Week 11: I launch in 48 hours

Weeks like this give me the chills.

After hundreds of hours of work (465, to be exact), ShadowTraffic will be made available to the public.

I think many people spend their careers trying to figure out what their passion is all about, but I'm lucky that I found mine early: I like making things and showing them to people. And here we are.

On Tuesday, November 14th at 10:00 AM PST, I'll launch ShadowTraffic and try to climb to the front page of Hacker News and Product Hunt.

Can I ask one thing of you? Set a reminder on your calendar/phone to upvote me at the time. It'd mean the world to me.

And regardless of what happens, I just want to take a second and thank all of you for following my journey. I may be working on this product solo, but I’ve been lifted up by you countless times with your encouragement.

With that said, here's what I did to get ready for the launch.

Write the plan down

I’m not sure there’s any aspect of building a product that’s more physically and mentally demanding than launch day. There’s a lot to do, and there’s so much that can go wrong. It’s like a comet coming around once every 4 years—you don’t want to mess up a thing!

So if you’re winging the days and weeks before, you’re gambling with all your hard work.

For ShadowTraffic, I wrote down a detailed 7-day plan. I spelled out what I want to happen with:

• The social media content

• The blog

• The giveaway (more on that in a second)

Writing it down helps me a relax a bit, because now I’m just mechanically ticking items off one by one.

Raise awareness

If you want your launch to go well, it helps if people know about it ahead of time. I’ve worked on so many products where the launch date and content were kept a secret. This hardly ever makes sense.

Ask people for help. Your friends want to help you.

When they have a heads up, they can more easily spread the word.

This week, I asked every person who’s been involved with ShadowTraffic to help me—here included.

Give it away for free

It’s hard to part with your hard work without receiving dollars, especially at the beginning. But come launch day, the overriding priority is for people to use what you built.

The best way to do that is to give it a way for free.

I made a few last minute decisions to make that easier:

• I increased the free trial from 2 weeks to 3 months.

• I 10xed the free trial speed, from capping at 60 events/second to 600.

• I gave away 25+ Developer licenses to people who helped me—not the least because it’s the right thing to do.

• I gave away a handful of 3-month Enterprise licenses to companies who helped trial the software.

• And come next week, stay on the lookout, because I’ll have a surprise giveaway of 36 free Developer licenses.

If even a small number of those people who got a free-be come back to me as customers, it’ll all be worth it.

Do a dress rehearsal

It goes without saying, but on launch day, leave nothing to chance. I spent this week obsessing over the first 5 minutes of the product.

• I made the website ultra slick

• I tidied up the welcome email to make it clear how get immediate value from the product

• I put together a suite of 18+ examples

• I filmed a comprehensive YouTube video series, walking you through how to use it

I’m ready

In the last 90 days, I held 55 sales pitch meetings, sent 261 emails, and wrote 5.5K lines of code.

Maybe ShadowTraffic won’t go anywhere.

But even if it doesn’t, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I played it well.