Post-launch checklist for indie founders: 7 days after Product Hunt

TLDR

The 7 days after a Product Hunt launch are where the actual signups happen — or don’t. This is the day-by-day checklist with 12 actions, pass criteria, and a leverage ranking. Same content as the scorecard on the homepage, but each row gets its own paragraph of rationale and a common-failure mode.

Twelve rows is not arbitrary. Six is too few to cover a week; eighteen is too many to actually do. The 12 are the actions that recur in the postmortem literature on r/SideProject, r/Entrepreneur, and IndieHackers S-001 S-002 S-012.

Why this checklist exists

Founders do not lack ideas. They lack a plan that survives the launch-day adrenaline crash. Most post-launch checklists fail one of two ways: they’re 30-row vendor pitches (too long to read at 11 PM after launch), or they’re 5-row inspirational lists (too vague to act on).

This one is 12 rows. Each row has a pass criterion, a common failure mode, and a leverage rating (1–3) that tells you which gaps to close first if you can only do half.

Day-by-day breakdown

Day 1 — launch day

Tactic 1: Reply to every PH comment within 2 hours. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: Every comment has a threaded reply, including the edge questions (“does it support X?”, “what’s the tech stack?”).
• Common failure: Founder answers the top 3 comments and burns out, missing the long-tail questions where genuine buyers live.
• Source pattern: Repeated across r/SideProject postmortems S-001.

Tactic 2: Personal DM to the top 10 upvoters. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: 10 DMs sent, each referencing the recipient’s bio, last post, or company. 3+ replies.
• Common failure: Generic “thanks for the upvote, would love your feedback!” blast — 0 replies.
• Source pattern: IndieHackers community threads document the personalization differential S-002.

Tactic 3: Pin the day’s two best comment threads. Leverage 1/3.

• Pass: Two threads pinned that show real use cases or testimonials.
• Common failure: Pinned your own “thanks for the support!” comment — kills momentum.

Day 2 — Show HN day

Tactic 4: Show HN post that links the launch page, posted 9–10 AM ET. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: Posted in the 9–10 AM ET window, Monday–Thursday. Title is a question or specific claim. No marketing voice in the body.
• Common failure: Posted at 4 PM ET with title “Show HN: My new app for X”. Buried by HN rank decay S-003.
• Source pattern: HN ranking guidelines + founder writeups S-004 S-016.

Tactic 5: Email the warmest 20 contacts personally. Leverage 2/3.

• Pass: 20 emails sent, each mentions a specific thing about the recipient.
• Common failure: BCC blast to 200 with “Just launched on PH! Would mean a lot…” — 1 reply.

Day 3 — retrospective day

Tactic 6: Write the post-launch retrospective on IndieHackers. Leverage 2/3.

• Pass: Numbers-led retro: signups, source breakdown, what you’d do differently.
• Common failure: “I’ll write it next week” — and you don’t.
• Source pattern: IH retrospective threads consistently surface a community of buyers, not just lurkers S-002.

Tactic 7: Identify the 3 communities where your ICP actually hangs out. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: 3 named subreddits/Discords/Slacks with member counts and posting rules read.
• Common failure: Posted in r/SideProject and r/SaaS and called it “distribution” S-013.

Day 4 — outreach day

Tactic 8: Reach out to 5 newsletters/podcasts in the niche. Leverage 2/3.

• Pass: 5 outreach emails sent with a specific story angle, not a press release.
• Common failure: Sent the PH page link with “thought this might interest you”.

Day 5 — measurement day

Tactic 9: Track referral sources in Plausible/PostHog and label them. Leverage 2/3.

• Pass: Top 5 referrers identified by name; you know which one converted best.
• Common failure: Still staring at the PH page’s vanity upvote count.

Day 6 — content day

Tactic 10: Publish one teardown blog post that answers a specific long-tail query. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: Post lives on your domain, has internal links, targets a specific search query.
• Common failure: Wrote a Medium thinkpiece about “lessons learned” — earns no backlinks for you S-002.

Day 7 — planning day

Tactic 11: Submit to 3 secondary directories. Leverage 1/3.

• Pass: 3 submissions with proper screenshots and category fits (BetaList, Uneed, AlternativeTo).
• Common failure: Skipped because “PH was enough” (it wasn’t).

Tactic 12: Plan the next 21 days with one channel anchor per week. Leverage 3/3.

• Pass: Week 2/3/4 each have one specific channel and one specific output.
• Common failure: Calendar empty — momentum decays into spreadsheet fatigue.

Visual — leverage map

Day → 1 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 5 6 7 7
Lev → 3 3 1 3 2 2 3 2 2 3 1 3
       ▓ ▓ ░ ▓ ▒ ▒ ▓ ▒ ▒ ▓ ░ ▓
              ↑       ↑     ↑       ↑     ↑
   Show HN   Niche  Teardown   Plan-30

If you can only do six rows in the week, prioritize the leverage-3 rows (1, 2, 4, 7, 10, 12). Skip 3 and 11 first; they’re the lowest-leverage items.

Common mistakes

FAQ

What if I missed Day 1’s actions? Do them on Day 2. The rows are sequenced for efficiency, not as hard constraints. Late-but-done beats on-time-but-skipped.

Do I really need to write a retrospective? Yes. The retro is the post that compounds. It earns IH comments, it earns subscribers to your post-launch followup, and it’s the post you reference when a journalist asks about the launch.

What if my product is B2B and most of these are B2C-coded? The patterns still apply. Substitute “LinkedIn DMs” for “personal DMs to upvoters”, “industry Slack” for “niche subreddit”, and “trade publication” for “newsletter”. The structure is the same.

Should I rerun the checklist next month? No — the checklist is for the 7 days after launch. Beyond that, switch to the 30-day distribution plan.

Next steps

Run the interactive scorecard on the homepage — it’s the same 12 rows, with a live percentage and a top-3 gap ranking based on the leverage scores. Then read the Show HN 9 AM ET timing rule for Tactic 4 specifically, and the 30-day distribution plan for Weeks 2–4.