Marketing & Growth · May 6, 2026 · The SOFTIE team
Your product launch plan for the first 90 days
Launch day is loud and then, usually, very quiet. The teams that grow are the ones who planned for the quiet part before the announcement went out.
This is the ninety day plan we run with clients, watch, fix, then grow, in that order and with one focus at a time.
Weeks one and two. Watch, do not build.
Resist the urge to ship features in the first fortnight. Instead, instrument the product, activation rate, time to first value, drop off by step, and the pages people leave from.
Read every support message and tag it by theme. Ten messages about the same confusing screen is a roadmap, not noise.
Set a single north star metric for the quarter. For most early products it is weekly active users completing the core action, not signups.
Weeks three to six. Fix onboarding and the top three frictions.
Sort your friction list by how many users hit it and how close it sits to first value. Fix the top three properly rather than twelve partially.
User onboarding is usually the highest leverage work in this window. Shorten the path to the first meaningful result, remove optional fields, add sensible defaults.
Then tell the launch story again to a new audience. Most products are under marketed rather than under built.
Weeks seven to twelve. Pick one growth channel and go deep.
Choose a single acquisition channel. Search and content, partnerships, outbound, paid, or community. One channel done properly beats four done casually, because only a concentrated effort produces a readable signal.
Give the channel a target, a weekly cadence and a twelve week runway. For search that means publishing consistently against real demand and improving pages you already rank for.
Review monthly against retention, not just traffic. Growth on top of weak retention is a leaking bucket.
Build a feedback loop you can keep running
Make a standing thirty minute weekly review. Metrics, top feedback themes, one decision. Keeping it short keeps it alive after the launch adrenaline fades.
Close the loop publicly. Telling users what changed because of their feedback is one of the cheapest retention tactics available.
Frequently asked questions
What should I measure first after launch?
Activation and time to first value. Both tell you whether new users reach the point where the product is useful, which predicts retention better than signups.
How we help
Launching soon? We help with the launch, the marketing and everything after it.