The SaaS launch checklist: from live product to $1M ARR

Until this exists, every decision after it is a guess dressed as a strategy.

Target: Core funnel events firing in production

A visitor decides before they scroll. Most of your traffic never sees section two.

Target: A stranger can restate what you do, correctly

Two audiences read your HTML now: search crawlers and answer engines. Serve both.

Target: Homepage indexed; structured data valid

Directories, review sites and buyers all check the same handful of pages.

Target: No missing legal or contact page

• 1.4.1Publish a privacy policyA hard requirement for almost every Tier-1 and Tier-2 directory.

  45m

• 1.4.2Publish terms of serviceSame requirement, same afternoon.

  45m

• 1.4.3Add a consent banner that defaults to decliningEU trafficOnly if you take EU traffic. Default-on tracking is the fine, not the banner.

  45m

• 1.4.4Write an About page with a real name and faceAnonymous SaaS converts worse and gets rejected by curated directories.

  45m

• 1.4.5Publish a support address a human readsIn Phase 1 that human is you, and the replies are the research.

  15m

• 1.4.6Put up a status pageB2BCheap credibility, and it stops the first outage becoming a support flood.

  45m

Test with a real card, on a real phone, from a real network. Not in test mode.

Target: One successful live charge

• 1.5.1Take one real charge in live modeCharge yourself a dollar. Test mode hides at least one real failure, always.

  1h

• 1.5.2Complete checkout on a phoneMost of your launch-day traffic arrives on mobile, from a link in a feed.

  20m

• 1.5.3Turn on failed-payment emailsInvoluntary churn is the cheapest revenue you will ever recover. Switch it on now.

  30m

• 1.5.4Handle sales tax and VATStripe Tax, or a merchant of record. Decide once; retrofitting is genuinely painful.

  1h

• 1.5.5State the refund and cancellation policyA visible refund policy raises conversion more than it costs in refunds.

  20m

Handles and deliverability take days to fix and minutes to reserve.

Target: All primary handles reserved; DMARC passing

• 1.6.1Set up domain email with SPF, DKIM and DMARCPhase 1 is 250 cold emails. Without this they land in spam and you burn the domain.

  1h

• 1.6.2Reserve every handle you might wantX, LinkedIn, Reddit, GitHub, Product Hunt, Discord, YouTube, Bluesky. Same name everywhere.

  45m

  Yours to do, in your own accounts:

  • X — Sign up with the product’s name as the username. Already have an account for it? Change the name at x.com/settings/screen_name.
  • LinkedIn company page — Create a company page from your own profile and set its public URL to the product’s name.
  • Reddit — Register the product’s name as a username. Post as yourself and say you built it.
  • GitHub organisation — Create a free organisation with the product’s name.
  • Product Hunt — Sign up as yourself, the maker, and set your username. The product page itself is made at launch.
  • Discord — Add a Server → Create My Own, named after the product. A custom invite link needs server boosts, so the name is what you reserve now.
  • YouTube — Choose the product’s name as the channel handle.
  • Bluesky — Create an account with the product’s name. A later step turns the handle into your own domain.
• 1.6.3Build the logo packPNG, SVG, 1024×1024 square, favicon. Every directory form asks for a different one.

  45m

• 1.6.4Put email capture on the siteEven with nothing to send yet. The list you start today is the launch audience in Phase 2.

  45m

• 1.6.5Wire the transactional email senderSeparate domain or subdomain from marketing mail, so one cannot poison the other.

  45m

Named. Not “SaaS founders”. A person, a company, and why they would care this month.

Target: 100 qualified prospects

• 2.1.1List 25 people from your own networkThe list you are embarrassed to use is the list that converts first.

  45m

• 2.1.2List 25 from communities where your ICP postsPull them from people who described your problem in their own words in the last 90 days.

  1h

• 2.1.3List 25 from competitor reviewsG2 and Capterra 2- and 3-star reviews are a list of people actively unhappy with the incumbent.

  1h

• 2.1.4List 25 with a live trigger eventHiring for the role, a new person in the seat that buys, a funding round, a migration announcement, a public complaint. Free places to watch: the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby job feeds, SEC Form D filings, and the ad libraries. If what you sell replaces the role, one still open after two months is the strongest of all. A trigger from a year ago is not a trigger — date every one and drop the stale.

  1h

• 2.1.5Qualify each one in a sentenceProblem, trigger, and whether you can actually reach them. Cut anyone failing the third.

  1h

• 2.1.6List everyone who ever signed up to anything you built beforeDead waitlists, a shut-down side project, the product that did not work. They already trusted you once, which is the expensive half, and nobody else can email them.

  45m

• 2.1.7List 25 who commented on a competitor founder’s posts this monthPick the three accounts that already own your audience and read their comment sections: people mid-comparison, in public, for free. The signal decides who you write to — never what you write. “Saw you liked their post” reads as surveillance.

  1h

• 2.1.8List 25 from the rosters your buyers’ industry already publishesB2BAssociation member lists, state licence lookups, or a Google Maps search by category and postcode, where the review count is a free size estimate. A licensed business is real and operating, and almost nobody else is writing to it from that list. Maps gives the phone number too: an owner who runs the business from a phone answers a call, not an email.

  1h

Founder-sent beats anything else at this stage, and teaches you the objections.

Target: 100 personal touches, ≥10% reply rate

Needs 2.1 build a list of 100 named humans

• 2.2.4Count the five outbound numbers, not just the reply rateReplies, then the ones that are actually positive, then meetings booked, then meetings that happened, then closes. Each rung fails for its own reason, and a 10% reply rate made of polite noes is a copy problem wearing a success. Split it by list segment too — one or two segments usually carry everything, and the average hides which.

  45m

This is the only phase where you can. The information you get here shapes everything after.

Target: 10 recorded conversations

• 2.3.1Offer every signup a 15-minute callMaybe one in five accepts. Those five are worth more than a hundred analytics sessions.

  30m

• 2.3.2Run ten problem interviews and record themAsk what they did before you, and what it cost. Never pitch during one.

  5h

• 2.3.3Interview every user who leavesAt ten customers, one churn interview outweighs any dashboard you could build.

  1h

• 2.3.4Write the top-five objections listVerbatim, in their words. This document becomes your homepage, FAQ and ad copy.

  45m

  Needs 2.3.2 run ten problem interviews and record them

• 2.3.5Fix the number one objectionIn the product or in the copy. Fixing it in copy is legitimate and much faster.

  4h

  Needs 2.3.4 write the top-five objections list

Acquisition is wasted while the first run leaves people staring at an empty screen.

Target: Activation rate ≥ 40% of signups

Needs 1.1.2.1 pick the activation event

• 2.4.1Instrument time-to-activationMedian minutes from signup to the activation event. Then halve it.

  45m

• 2.4.2Delete one step from signupEvery removed field is measurable conversion. Start with the one you “might need later”.

  1h

• 2.4.3Make the empty state do the workSample data, a template, or a one-click demo. Never a blank canvas and good luck.

  2h

• 2.4.4Send a three-email first-week sequenceDay 0 get started, day 2 the one feature that matters, day 5 ask what got in the way.

  2h

• 2.4.5Personally message everyone who stallsSigned up, never activated. One sentence, from you, asking what stopped them.

  30m

• 2.4.6Put one real result in front of them before the priceB2CNot a tour of the feature — one actual output, on their own input. The ask lands differently once they have already seen the thing work.

  3h

  Needs 1.1.2.1 pick the activation event

• 2.4.7Treat the first-run sequence as a permanent test surfaceB2CCal AI reports 424 variants across 123 experiments — 160 of them paywall designs — for a 31% lift in trial-to-paid. It is a growth engine, not a screen you finish.

  2h

  Needs 2.4.6 put one real result in front of them before the price

Testimonials are easiest to get from your first ten and hardest from your first thousand.

Target: 3 testimonials, 1 case study with a real number

• 2.5.1Ask your three happiest users for a testimonialSend them a draft to edit. “Write whatever you like” gets you nothing for three weeks.

  30m

• 2.5.2Put names or logos on the homepageAsk permission first. Three real names beat a wall of unfamiliar logos.

  30m

• 2.5.3Write case study number oneOne customer, one before number, one after number, one quote. Two pages maximum.

  3h·how to do it

• 2.5.4Record a two-minute customer videoA shaky call recording with real specifics beats a produced testimonial with none.

  1h

• 2.5.5Line up 20 users willing to review you laterYou need 20 asks to land 10 G2 reviews in Phase 2. Ask permission now, cash it in then.

  30m

Directories are the source of link equity; these are the destination. Submitting first wastes the listing.

Target: 8+ conversion-intent pages live and indexed

• 3.1.3Write the best-of list for your own categoryInclude your competitors honestly. This ranks for category queries and becomes an AI citation source.

  4h·how to do it

• 3.1.4Ship one free tool or template galleryTypeform’s template library drove 30k non-branded signups. It is also a permanent link magnet.

  16h·how to do it·guide

DR is the gate on every competitive keyword you will ever want. It is bought with an afternoon of forms.

Target: ahrefs_dr ≥ 20 · referring_domains ≥ 30

Needs 3.1 build the pages the links will point at

• 3.2.13Answer the journalist requests in your fieldThe one route where the writer is already looking for you. Answer the question in the first sentence, from experience you can substantiate — no original data required, which is what makes it work at DR 20.

  2h·how to do it

Pages that are not indexed do not exist. This is where most content investment quietly dies.

Target: 50+ pages indexed in GSC

• 3.3.1Submit the sitemap to Google and BingThen check the coverage report for what was excluded and why.

  15m

  Needs 1.3.1.2 generate sitemap.xml automatically

• 3.3.2Set up IndexNowPush new URLs on publish instead of waiting for a crawl. One ping reaches Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and Yep — and, through Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and Copilot.

  45m

• 3.3.3Make every page reachable in three clicksOrphan pages do not get crawled. Internal links are the cheapest ranking factor you control.

  2h

• 3.3.4Clear the crawl errors in Search ConsoleEspecially “Discovered — currently not indexed”, which usually means thin or duplicate.

  2h

• 3.3.5Give every page four links from the body of other pagesNav and footer links sit on every page and separate nothing. Links written into the prose are the ones that carry — and vary the words you link on, because the same anchor repeated reads as a template. Read each anchor inside its own sentence: one that promises something the destination does not contain costs you the click and the reader.

  2h

  Needs 3.3.3 make every page reachable in three clicks

• 3.3.6Track indexed as a share of submitted, not as a countA hundred indexed pages reads as progress until you notice you asked for five hundred. One audited site had roughly one sitemap URL in five indexed.

  30m

  Needs 3.3.1 submit the sitemap to google and bing

• 3.3.7Claim the national consoles wherever a local engine competes with GoogleRead your country split first, then claim only where buyers are: Yandex (Russia, Turkey, CIS), Naver and Daum (Korea), Seznam (Czechia), Cốc Cốc (Vietnam), and Baidu, then Sogou, 360 and Shenma (China, which also wants Chinese pages and an ICP-filed host). All free.

  45m

  Needs 3.3.1 submit the sitemap to google and bing

AI-referred traffic converts far above organic search because the assistant pre-qualified them, and movement here leads revenue by about a quarter.

Target: 3+ AI citations across ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity

Needs 1.3.3 get ready to be quoted by answer engines

• 3.4.1Publish five pages answering real user questionsPull the questions verbatim from your support inbox and Phase 1 interviews.

  5h·how to do it

  Needs 2.3.4 write the top-five objections list

• 3.4.2Retrofit question-shaped headings on your top 10 pagesHeadings that match how people ask are what extraction matches against.

  2h·how to do it

• 3.4.3Publish a definition and stat block per core termSelf-contained, 40–60 words, one citable number. Written to be lifted whole.

  2h·how to do it

• 3.4.4Earn genuine mentions on Reddit and Hacker NewsBoth are indexed heavily by assistants. Genuine is doing the work; astroturf gets caught.

  3h·how to do it

• 3.4.5Write the twenty prompts you will re-ask foreverPrompts are keywords. Six shapes carry the decision: category, use case, comparison, alternative, “is X actually any good”, and the one with the buyer’s constraints in it — must do this, must connect to that, under this price. The last is where a shortlist is actually cut.

  1h

  Needs 1.3.3.3 record your ai-citation baseline

• 3.4.6Re-ask the whole portfolio monthly and score the answersThree clean sessions per prompt, with the model version logged: one answer a month is variance, not movement. Then score position, recommendation, accuracy and the sources behind it.

  2h

  Needs 3.4.5 write the twenty prompts you will re-ask forever

• 3.4.7Read the prompts you lose as a to-do listWhoever gets recommended instead has something you do not — a category page, a review count, a comparison, a thread. Name that asset, then go and build it. On a prompt with constraints in it, check the cheaper failure first: often the product qualifies and the fact that proves it is written down nowhere a model can reach.

  45m

  Needs 3.4.6 re-ask the whole portfolio monthly and score the answers

• 3.4.8Mine Bing’s grounding queries for the prompts you are already cited onThe AI Performance report counts your citations in Copilot and Bing’s AI summaries, page by page, and lists the grounding queries — what the model actually searched when it used you. It is the only first-party record of an AI engine’s own queries; fold them into the portfolio.

  30m·Bing Webmaster Tools → AI Performance

  Needs 1.1.1.6 connect bing webmaster tools

• 3.4.9Read which pages AI Overviews and AI Mode pull in, in Search ConsoleThe generative AI report counts impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode by page, country and device — no clicks and no queries, so read it for which pages Google’s answers draw on, not for traffic. Low everywhere can mean the site is opted out: check that setting before blaming the content.

  20m·Search Console → Generative AI performance

  Needs 1.1.1.5 connect google search console

Around 80% of failed launches fail for one of two reasons: no warm audience, or asking for upvotes.

Target: Top 5 of the day; 30+ genuine comments

Needs 3.1 build the pages the links will point at

A zero-review G2 listing is worse than no listing. Ten reviews is the threshold that matters.

Target: 10 G2 reviews

Needs 3.2.2.3 create the g2 listing

how to do it

• 3.6.1Identify 20 users who did something meaningfulNot signups — users who got a result. Reviews from non-users read as fake and get removed.

  30m

  Needs 2.5.5 line up 20 users willing to review you later

• 3.6.2Email each one a direct review linkDirect URL, no landing page in between. Friction here costs about 70% of responses.

  1h

• 3.6.3Offer a modest thank-you where the platform allows itG2 and TrustRadius permit small gift cards. Check the policy per platform, not per rumour.

  20m

• 3.6.4Follow up once after five daysExpect roughly 50% conversion from 20 asks. That is your ten.

  30m

• 3.6.5Reach 20 reviews at 4.0+ for the free badge“Users Love Us” is free. Do not buy a paid G2 plan in year one.

  1h

• 3.6.6Diary the G2 report cut-offsSummer closes around 28 April, Fall around 28 July. Missing one costs a quarter.

  10m

• 3.6.7Sit in every G2 category your top three competitors shareCategories decide which grids your reviews count toward. Read your three competitors’ category lists, then request every one all three share — G2’s research team wants a demo or a doc as evidence, so attach one.

  45m·my.G2 → Product Profile → Product Categories

• 3.6.8Reply to every G2 review within the weekReplies publish under the review with your name on them. A calm answer to a 3-star does more for a buyer on the fence than a sixth 5-star; G2’s own guidance is seven days.

  45m·my.G2 → Review Management → Review Activity

The B2C counterpart to a G2 grid: buyers check a public rating before they trust a card form.

Target: 20 reviews at 4.0+

how to do it

• 3.7.1Claim the Trustpilot profileThe default place a consumer checks whether you are real. Free to claim.

  30m·Trustpilot·DR 93 · nofollow·how to do it

• 3.7.2Ask 20 happy users for a review, one at a timeAfter a win in-product, never on a schedule. Direct link, no landing page in between.

  1h

  Needs 2.5.5 line up 20 users willing to review you later

• 3.7.3Reply to every review, especially the bad onesA well-handled 2-star does more for trust than another 5-star. Public replies are the product.

  45m

• 3.7.4Put the rating on the pricing pageProof belongs at the decision point, not on a testimonials page nobody opens.

  45m

  Needs 1.2.3.1 publish plans with real numbers

Ten pieces that answer what your buyers actually search, not what you find interesting.

Target: 10 published pieces against 3 clusters

guide

• 3.8.1Pick three topic clusters from real search demandVolume you can plausibly rank for at DR 20 — long-tail, low-difficulty, high-intent. Phrase them the way competitor reviews and threads do; nobody has ever searched the words a marketer would pick.

  2h

• 3.8.2Publish ten posts against those clustersThree or four per cluster beats ten scattered posts. Depth in one place is what ranks.

  40h

• 3.8.3Publish one original-data study“We analysed 10,000 X and found Y” becomes the citation everyone else has to use.

  16h·how to do it

• 3.8.4Publish one definitive how-to guideThe page you would send someone who knows nothing. Long, structured, genuinely complete.

  12h·how to do it

• 3.8.5Publish a cost and pricing explainer for your category“How much does X cost” is bottom-of-funnel traffic that competitors refuse to answer.

  4h·how to do it

• 3.8.7Link every post to the page that takes money, from inside the proseNot the nav, not a banner — a sentence in the body where the product is the answer to what the reader just learned. This is the difference between content that ranks and content that pays.

  2h

  Needs 3.8.2 publish ten posts against those clusters

• 3.8.8Put a real byline on every post, linked to one author pageDo it for the reader and the links, not for rankings — sites with real bylines earn roughly twice the referring domains and show no ranking lift once those links are accounted for.

  1h

  Needs 3.8.2 publish ten posts against those clusters

• 3.8.9Pitch the study while the number is still newA statistic earns you referring domains, not positions — and only the ones you go and collect. Send the finding, not the product, to the people who already write about your category.

  3h·how to do it

  Needs 3.8.3 publish one original-data study

• 3.8.10Publish the “[niche] statistics” page writers have to citeFifty-plus figures, each traced to the body that produced it, dated and stated once, with ten quotable lines on top. Writers Google it the night before publishing; the link is the citation of the figure itself.

  8h·how to do it

• 3.8.11Harvest People Also Ask under each cluster term for the spoke questionsClick every question open and Google spawns more: that is Google listing the sub-questions it wants answered. One question per page, answered in the first sentence.

  45m

  Needs 3.8.1 pick three topic clusters from real search demand

Store search is where most app installs begin, and the listing is the whole funnel: it is the ad, the landing page and the checkout in one screen.

Target: Store impressions → install rate you can watch move

• 3.9.1Take the listing terms from the store ad platform, not from a guessThe ad tools expose what people actually type into the store — the closest thing to a keyword planner the app stores have.

  2h

• 3.9.2Make the first three screenshots carry the whole pitchAlmost nobody scrolls the gallery or reads the description. Three frames have to say what it is, who it is for and why it is better.

  4h

  Needs 3.9.1 take the listing terms from the store ad platform, not from a guess

• 3.9.3Localise the listing long before you localise the companyThe listing is a few hundred words and the store ranks each language separately. A market nobody else bothered to translate for is the cheapest ranking you will ever get.

  3h

  Needs 3.9.1 take the listing terms from the store ad platform, not from a guess

• 3.9.4Ask for the rating at the moment the app just workedRating is both ranking input and conversion rate on the same screen. Ask after a success, never on launch, and never twice.

  1h

• 3.9.5Publish the Play listing before you decide iOS is the marketJournable crossed $100k/month with most of it reportedly from Android — a store the founder crowd treats as an afterthought, and a second listing costs a day.

  8h·costs money

  Needs 3.9.2 make the first three screenshots carry the whole pitch

Your site makes the claim; the rest of the internet is what validates it. The most important page for a query you want is often not yours.

Target: Named on 5 sources that recur across your priority queries

Needs 3.4.5 write the twenty prompts you will re-ask forever

• 3.10.1List every third-party page that keeps appearingRun your ten highest-intent searches and ten prompts and write down what comes back: threads, listicles, review categories, videos. The repeats are the map.

  2h

• 3.10.2Rank each source by how often it appears and how much it swaysA thread cited across nine of your queries beats a DR 80 mention nobody buying reads. Work only the handful scoring high on both.

  45m

  Needs 3.10.1 list every third-party page that keeps appearing

• 3.10.3Earn a place on the top five, one at a timeFind out who owns each one and how it earns before you spend the afternoon: many ranking listicles are affiliate properties, where the price is a commission and no pitch will move them.

  8h

  Needs 3.10.2 rank each source by how often it appears and how much it sways

• 3.10.4Make every source describe you the same wayOne category sentence, repeated by your site, your listings, your reviewers and your press. Consensus is what turns a claim into something a model will repeat.

  2h·how to do it

  Needs 1.2.1.1 write the one-sentence positioning statement

You cannot pick a winner you cannot see. This objective is the referee for the whole phase.

Target: Source known for ≥80% of signups

guide

• 4.1.1Add “how did you hear about us?” to signupA free-text box beats any tracking script for dark-social discovery. Read every answer.

  1h·guide

• 4.1.2UTM every outbound link you controlUse the convention you wrote in Phase 0. Untagged links become “direct” and hide your winner.

  30m

  Needs 1.1.1.4 write down your utm convention

• 4.1.3Store first-touch and last-touch on the user recordFirst touch tells you what to invest in; last touch tells you what to fix.

  2h

• 4.1.4Build a weekly channel report you will actually readFive rows: channel, signups, cost, CAC, trend. Anything longer gets skipped by week three.

  2h

• 4.1.5Attribute signups to the page that earned them, not just the channelSessions rank your posts one way and signups rank them another. Carry it through to activation and retention too — pieces that pull the wrong reader show up as churn months later, not as a bad traffic number.

  2h

  Needs 4.1.3 store first-touch and last-touch on the user record

• 4.1.6Read the AI Assistant channel as its own rowGA4 files ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and Grok referrals under AI Assistant already — but not AI Overviews or AI Mode, which stay inside Organic Search. Judge the row on conversion rate, not sessions: it is the one place on your own property where “the assistant pre-qualified them” is checkable, and it counts the clicks only, never the reads.

  15m·GA4 default channel groups

• 4.1.7Tag every store link so an install can be traced to the post that earned itmobile appApp Store links take a campaign token (pt and ct) and Google Play reads UTM source and campaign on store links; both report in the store’s own analytics, free, with no SDK. Apple credits a first download within 24 hours of the click and hides any figure under five.

  30m·App Store Connect: campaign links

Five candidates, four weeks, one scorecard, no sentiment. Phase 3 already made organic your incumbent, so it enters the tournament like everything else — otherwise you are testing around the bet you have already placed.

Target: 5 channels tested to a decision

Needs 4.1 know where signups actually come from

guide

• 4.2.1Pick five candidate channelsWhere your ICP already gathers, not where you are most comfortable posting — and count the channel Phase 3 built as one of the five, scored on the same card as the newcomers.

  45m·guide

• 4.2.2Define the four-week test for eachVolume, budget, and the number that counts as a pass. Written before you start, not after.

  1h

• 4.2.3Run all five in parallel for four weeksParallel, not sequential — sequential testing takes five months and the market moves.

  20h

• 4.2.4Score each on signups, CAC, effort and ceilingCeiling matters most: a channel that works but caps at 20 signups a month is not the winner.

  1h

• 4.2.5Kill the bottom three without negotiatingThe sunk cost is already sunk. Half-running four channels is how companies stall here.

  15m

• 4.2.6Rent the expensive channels once before you build oneAppear on somebody else’s podcast, channel or newsletter in your space and watch what their audience does. If it is one of their better performing pieces, that is a real signal for a fraction of the cost of finding out yourself.

  4h

  Needs 4.2.1 pick five candidate channels

Most founders find their channel and then under-invest in it by an order of magnitude.

Target: Winner drives ≥40% of new signups

Needs 4.2 run the channel tournament

• 4.3.1Triple the volume on the winning channelBefore you optimise anything. Volume finds the ceiling faster than cleverness does.

  10h

• 4.3.2Document it as a repeatable SOPIf it lives only in your head, it cannot be delegated in Phase 4 and it dies when you get busy.

  2h

• 4.3.3Set a weekly cadence and defend itConsistency beats intensity in every distribution channel that compounds.

  15m

• 4.3.4Find out what breaks at ten times the volumeSupport load, moderation limits, ad auction, your own hours. Know it before you hit it.

  1h

Doubling conversion is usually cheaper than doubling traffic, and it multiplies every channel.

Target: Visitor → signup rate doubled

guide

• 4.4.1Test the homepage, one change at a timeHeadline first — it moves more than anything else on the page.

  5h

• 4.4.2Test the pricing pagePlan naming, ordering, the annual toggle, and what the free tier is allowed to do.

  5h

• 4.4.3Put social proof at the decision pointNext to the button, not in a carousel three sections down.

  1h

• 4.4.4Cut signup to the minimum viable fieldsEverything else can be asked after they are in and already invested.

  1h

• 4.4.5Add one exit-intent offerThe lead magnet from Phase 3.5, not a discount. Discounts train people to wait.

  2h

• 4.4.6Test a free tier against an extended trialThis decision shapes your CAC, your churn and your support load for years. In RevenueCat’s 2026 app data a hard paywall converts five times freemium on day-35 trial-to-paid with the same first-year retention — and those paywalls still carry trials, where 17–32 days beats 3 by 70%. Test it deliberately.

  10h

At this size the founder outperforms the brand account by a wide margin. Use it while it lasts.

Target: Consistent posting for 12 straight weeks

guide

• 4.5.1Post 3–5 times a week on the one platform your ICP usesOne platform, and one subject. Cross-posting everywhere reads as a broadcast and performs like one — and every change of lane restarts the trust you had already earned.

  15h

• 4.5.2Publish a build-in-public metrics post monthlyReal numbers, including the bad month. This is the post that gets shared.

  1h·how to do it

• 4.5.3Publish the open-books postRevenue, costs, what you got wrong. Uncomfortable, and reliably the best-performing post you write.

  1h·how to do it

• 4.5.4Comment ten times more than you postThe reach is the thread itself, not the feed — on X the ranker drops replies from accounts a viewer does not follow. Being read under a big post still beats being unread under your own.

  10h·how to do it

• 4.5.5Write the post people forward, not the post people likeSending something to one person costs more than tapping a heart, and every ranker reads it that way. Ask of a draft: who would paste this into a DM, and what would they say about it?

  1h

  Needs 4.5.1 post 3–5 times a week on the one platform your icp uses

• 4.5.6Check who followed you this month, not how manyOpen the last fifty and ask how many could buy. Follower count is a lagging indicator of the wrong thing — an audience with no budget grows the number and nothing else.

  30m

  Needs 4.5.1 post 3–5 times a week on the one platform your icp uses

• 4.5.7When growth flattens, find out which ceiling you hitRun one idea that already worked in a different shape. If it performs, the format was tired; if new shapes flop too, you have reached everyone in that niche who cares and the next audience is the fix.

  45m

  Needs 4.5.1 post 3–5 times a week on the one platform your icp uses

The only audience no algorithm can take away from you. Start it before you need it.

Target: 1,000 subscribers

• 4.6.1Launch the newsletterPick a cadence you can hold on your worst week, not your best one.

  2h

  Needs 1.6.4 put email capture on the site

• 4.6.2Build a 7-day email course as the lead magnetConverts better than a PDF and teaches them to open your emails at the same time.

  16h·how to do it

• 4.6.3Build a welcome sequence from your greatest hitsYour five best pieces, sent automatically. Zero marginal cost, permanently.

  3h·how to do it

• 4.6.4Hold the cadence for twelve weeksTwelve consecutive sends is where a list stops being a liability and starts being an asset.

  12h

Ten posts was an experiment. A hundred is a channel — but only with a system behind it.

Target: 2–4 published per week, sustained

• 5.1.1Build the cluster map for 50 target keywordsPillar plus spokes, mapped to funnel stage. This is the brief for everything you commission.

  4h·guide

• 5.1.2Count how much of your own market you appear forThe share of your mapped queries you appear on at all — fixed once and weighted by intent, because a coverage number moves as easily by redrawing the denominator as by doing the work. A direction of travel, never a score.

  2h

  Needs 5.1.1 build the cluster map for 50 target keywords

• 5.1.3Audit the library by funnel stage before commissioning moreOne audited library ran 2,200 awareness posts to 21 near the purchase. Publish nearest revenue first: comparisons, alternatives, categories, use cases.

  1h

  Needs 5.1.1 build the cluster map for 50 target keywords

• 5.1.4Set and defend a publishing cadenceTwo a week forever beats ten in January and nothing until June.

  30m

• 5.1.5Contract a writer who knows the domainCheaper than your time and better than your seventh draft. Domain knowledge is non-negotiable.

  10h·costs money

• 5.1.6Write the editorial brief templateKeyword, angle, outline, sources required, internal links, and what a rejection looks like.

  2h

• 5.1.7Refresh the ten decaying posts each quarterUpdating a ranked page beats publishing a new one, almost every time. Save the live copy and its 90-day numbers, then read what outranks it and fix the gap — decay is usually the intent moving, not the writing ageing. Without the baseline a refresh can be neither reverted nor proved.

  8h

• 5.1.9Turn each guide into one visual card and post it to PinterestB2CPins are indexed and keep surfacing for months, so the asset compounds instead of scrolling away. Cheap to test: the guide already exists.

  2h·Pinterest

  Needs 5.1.4 set and defend a publishing cadence

• 5.1.11Pull the keywords your top three competitors rank for and you do notKeyword Gap in Semrush or Content Gap in Ahrefs, cut to where they sit in the top twenty and you are absent, difficulty under 40, a buying word in the query. Each survivor is a page to fix or a page to write — mark which, per row.

  2h·costs money

• 5.1.12Re-check every competitor claim against their current pages, quarterlyCompetitors ship; your comparison and alternative pages describe last year’s version. That is the page a buyer catches you on and an AI answer marks inaccurate. Their pricing and feature pages are the source — show the old line beside the new one.

  2h

  Needs 3.1.1.1 write /alternatives/[competitor] for each of your top 4

• 5.1.13Link each new post from the old ones, the week it shipsA page published today has nothing pointing at it. Search the back catalogue for the sentence that was already about this, and link from there — new pages cannot earn links from pages written before they existed unless someone goes back.

  45m

  Needs 5.1.4 set and defend a publishing cadence

One template, hundreds of pages, one search pattern. The largest single SEO lever at this stage.

Target: 200+ indexed programmatic pages

Needs 3.3 get indexed at scale

• 5.2.1Pick the template with real search demandVerify the pattern has volume before you build a generator for it. Most do not.

  2h

• 5.2.2Generate /integrations/[partner] pageshas integrationsThe Zapier playbook: programmatic integration pages drive ~15% of their organic traffic.

  20h·how to do it

• 5.2.3Extend alternative pages to every competitorYou wrote four by hand in Phase 2. Now cover the long tail of the category.

  20h

  Needs 3.1.1 publish alternative pages for your top competitors

• 5.2.4Build the template or use-case gallery to 100+ entriesOne indexable page each, with related entries at the bottom. That internal mesh is the engine.

  40h

• 5.2.5Interlink the generated pagesUnlinked generated pages are orphans and never get crawled at this volume.

  8h

• 5.2.6Add a thin-content quality gateNoindex anything below the bar. Mass-publishing thin pages is how sites get demoted wholesale.

  8h

The same emails you sent by hand in Phase 1, sent automatically and better.

Target: 6 automated flows live

guide

• 5.3.1Automate welcome and activationBehaviour-triggered, not day-based. “Has not activated after 48h” beats “day 2”.

  8h

  Needs 2.4.4 send a three-email first-week sequence

• 5.3.2Automate the trial-expiry sequenceDay −3, day −1, expiry day, day +3. The last one converts more than you expect.

  4h

• 5.3.3Build proper dunningCard retries plus four emails. Recovers 30–50% of involuntary churn for a day of work.

  4h

  Needs 1.5.3 turn on failed-payment emails

• 5.3.4Build the win-back sequenceSent 30 and 90 days after cancellation, and only when you have actually shipped their reason.

  4h

• 5.3.5Put an upgrade prompt at the limit momentWhen they hit the ceiling, not on a schedule. Context is the entire conversion rate.

  10h

• 5.3.6Automate the review ask after a winG2 weights a review down from day one — gently for 90 days, hard after 18 months — so the Phase 2 count is already shrinking. Send the ask after the third win, once per user, never on a schedule.

  4h

Acquisition that gets cheaper with scale instead of more expensive. Rare, and worth the build.

Target: 15% of signups from existing users

• 5.4.1Ship a double-sided referral incentiveBoth sides get something. One-sided programmes feel like being used, and perform like it.

  20h·how to do it

• 5.4.2Put a “made with” badge on free-tier outputThe classic bottom-up loop. Every free user becomes a distribution surface.

  16h·how to do it

• 5.4.3Trigger the ask at the promoter momentRight after a win in-product. Asking on a random Tuesday wastes the goodwill.

  8h·how to do it

• 5.4.4Create one genuinely shareable artefactA wrap, a score, a public report. Something users want to post because it flatters them.

  40h·how to do it

• 5.4.5Follow every customer who changes jobs to their new companyB2BThey arrive with new budget, a plan for their first ninety days and trust you already earned. Check the people who used you against LinkedIn each quarter, and open with the work you did together, not a pitch.

  1h

Integration marketplaces are simultaneously the highest-DR backlinks available and a real channel.

Target: 3 integrations shipped and co-launched

• 5.5.1List the 20 tools your customers already useAsk them; do not guess. The answer is rarely the one you would have picked.

  2h

• 5.5.2Ship the top three integrationsRanked by how many customers asked, not by how interesting the API is.

  60h

• 5.5.3Co-launch each one with the partnerShipping an integration silently is the most common way to waste one.

  20h·how to do it

• 5.5.4Get listed in their marketplaceshas integrationsZapier DR 91, HubSpot 93, Slack 89, Notion 88, Airtable 82. Worth engineering for on their own.

  20h

• 5.5.5Run newsletter cross-promos with five non-competing toolsSame audience, different product. The cheapest qualified reach available at this size.

  16h·how to do it

• 5.5.6Co-author one substantial asset with a partnerA report or benchmark you both promote. Two audiences, one production cost.

  20h·how to do it

Past roughly $20k MRR the founder-as-marketing-team stops scaling and starts capping growth.

Target: Founder time on execution below 20%

• 5.6.1Write the SOP setOne page per recurring motion. You already wrote the first in Phase 3.

  20h

  Needs 4.3.2 document it as a repeatable sop

• 5.6.2Hire the first marketing execution roleExecution, not strategy. You still own strategy at this size and should.

  40h·costs money

• 5.6.3Institute the weekly metrics reviewSame day, same five numbers, thirty minutes. The ritual is the point.

  30m

• 5.6.4Build the single dashboard everyone readsIf there are two dashboards there is no dashboard.

  8h

• 5.6.5Hand over the recurring reports first, and anything that sends or spends lastInternal, frequent, easy-to-check work goes first — the daily numbers, the weekly research — because a wrong answer costs nothing and shows within a day. Run each by hand until the output is right, then put it on a schedule; anything that talks to a customer or spends money keeps waiting for your yes, and the next job starts only once this one runs clean.

  1h

  Needs 5.6.1 write the sop set

At 5% monthly churn, $1M ARR needs you to sell $600k of new revenue a year just to stand still.

Target: Gross churn < 3%/mo

guide

• 6.1.1Measure gross and net revenue churn monthlyBoth numbers. Net alone hides a retention problem behind expansion revenue.

  1h·guide

• 6.1.2Put an exit survey on every cancellationFive fixed options plus free text. The free text is where the actual reason lives.

  4h

• 6.1.3Build a save-offer flowMatch the offer to the stated reason. A blanket discount buys back the wrong customers.

  20h

• 6.1.4Offer pause instead of cancelA paused customer returns far more often than a cancelled one you have to win back.

  12h

• 6.1.5Get net revenue retention above 100%Above 100%, existing customers grow revenue on their own. That is what makes $1M reachable.

  1h

Cheaper than acquisition and it compounds with every cohort you already own.

Target: ARPA up 30%

Needs 6.1 fix the leaky bucket first

• 6.2.1Add an expansion lever tied to valueSeats, usage, or workspaces — whichever grows as the customer gets more out of you.

  20h

• 6.2.2Introduce annual plans with a real discountTwo months free is the norm. It buys cash up front and a year of churn protection.

  10h

• 6.2.3Prompt upgrades at the value momentImmediately after a success in-product, never on a billing anniversary.

  10h

  Needs 5.3.5 put an upgrade prompt at the limit moment

• 6.2.4Raise prices for new customers and watchGrandfather everyone existing. Almost every product at this stage is underpriced.

  8h

• 6.2.5Repackage tiers around the value metricCharge for the thing that grows when they succeed, not for a feature checklist.

  20h

Paid works here and not earlier, because you finally know your real LTV and conversion rate.

Target: CAC payback < 12 months

Needs 4.1 know where signups actually come from, 6.1 fix the leaky bucket first

guide

• 6.3.1Compute CAC payback and write the ruleOne sentence that decides every future spend, before you spend anything.

  2h·guide

• 6.3.2Defend your branded searchCheap, high-converting, and it stops competitors buying the traffic you earned.

  8h·costs money

• 6.3.3Bid on competitor and alternative keywordsPoint them at the alternative pages you built in Phase 2, not at the homepage.

  10h·costs money·how to do it

  Needs 3.1.1 publish alternative pages for your top competitors

• 6.3.4Retarget readers of your best pagesWarm, self-selected, and vastly cheaper than cold prospecting.

  10h·costs money·how to do it

• 6.3.5Sponsor niche newslettersSmall lists with real trust beat large lists with none. Start with three.

  16h·costs money·how to do it

• 6.3.6Boost the organic posts that already workedThe cheapest paid social there is, because the creative is pre-validated — as evidence, not as a guarantee. A post the feed carried to the right people can still fail cold against an audience the platform picks for you. On TikTok the mechanism is a Spark Ad: the creator generates a code on their own post and it runs as it is, under their name.

  4h·costs money·how to do it

• 6.3.7Kill anything breaching the payback rule, monthlyEnforced without exceptions. This is the whole reason you wrote the rule down first.

  1h

• 6.3.8Run nine cold creatives built from the complaints you countedB2CThree angles from the top-counted complaints in Phase 1, three hooks each in their exact words, one ad set per angle. Enough to learn from, too few to split the budget into nothing.

  4h·costs money·how to do it

• 6.3.9Raise the budget in steps and re-read the payback at each oneA profitable campaign at £100 a day is not the same campaign at £1,000. Watch the cost of the LAST pound you spent, not the average — the average stays healthy long after the margin has gone. On Meta a big enough budget change restarts the learning phase, so read each level only from that edit, once it has about 50 conversions behind it.

  1h·costs money

  Needs 6.3.1 compute cac payback and write the rule

• 6.3.10Put an attribution partner in before the first paid installmobile appEach ad network counts its own installs, and on iOS they arrive late and coarse. A mobile measurement partner is the one ledger that de-duplicates them across networks — without it the payback rule is reading the vendors’ own scorecards. Free plans exclude paid campaigns, so budget it with the ads.

  4h·costs money

• 6.3.11Send every ad to a page whose first screen repeats its promiseThe click came for one sentence. If the hero says something else, the ad has paid for a visitor the page then loses. Where several angles share one page, its first screen carries the promise they all make — and Google rates the same fit as landing page experience.

  2h

One segment usually runs out somewhere near $1M. Open the next one before it does.

Target: Second segment at 20% of new revenue

• 6.4.1Find who already pays you the mostSegment by revenue and retention, not by how much you enjoy the conversations.

  2h

• 6.4.2Build the vertical landing page and proofTheir language, their case study, their integrations, their compliance question answered.

  20h

• 6.4.3Price for that segment specificallyDifferent willingness to pay usually means a different package, not a different discount.

  10h

• 6.4.4Dedicate one channel to itRun the Phase 3 tournament again, scoped to the new segment. It rarely has the same winner.

  40h

Not a sales team. A human on the deals where a human changes the outcome.

Target: Deals above threshold get a human

guide

• 6.5.1Define the deal size that earns a humanBelow it, self-serve only. Ambiguity here quietly destroys your unit economics.

  1h

• 6.5.2Add a book-a-demo path for those deals onlyQualify before booking. A calendar open to everyone consumes the week.

  10h

• 6.5.3Publish the security and compliance pageSOC 2 status, DPA, subprocessors, data residency. This page unblocks deals on its own.

  20h

• 6.5.4Write battle cards for the three competitors you meet mostWhere you win, where you honestly lose, and the question that reframes the comparison.

  10h

• 6.5.5Offer paid implementation for large accountsImproves their retention and yours, and it prices out the accounts you cannot serve.

  20h

• 6.5.6Answer every demo request within the hourA demo request is the warmest lead there is, and it cools by the hour — the one you call back the next morning has usually booked someone else. Route each to a named person with an alert, and give a non-fit a useful answer rather than silence.

  1h

  Needs 6.5.2 add a book-a-demo path for those deals only

• 6.5.7Record why each lost deal said no, and re-open it only when that changesBudget, timing, a missing feature, the wrong person — each has its own change to watch for: a funding round, a new quarter, the feature shipping, a new owner in the seat. Re-open on the change, leading with the objection; never on a calendar.

  1h

  Needs 6.5.2 add a book-a-demo path for those deals only

The last compounding asset: being the name people say when they describe the problem.

Target: Rank 1–3 for the category term

• 6.6.1Pick the term you intend to ownOne term. Something buyers already search, not a phrase you invented in a workshop.

  2h

• 6.6.2Publish the definitive resource on itThe page that makes every other page on the topic look thin.

  40h·how to do it

• 6.6.3Publish the annual state-of-the-niche reportRecurring original data. It becomes the thing journalists and AI answers cite by default.

  10 days·how to do it

• 6.6.4Pitch press off the original dataJournalists want the number, not the product. Lead with the finding.

  16h·how to do it

• 6.6.5Do twelve podcasts in a quarterBatch the pitching. One recorded hour keeps returning traffic for years.

  40h·how to do it

• 6.6.6Give one conference talk or workshopA talk becomes a video, a post, a lead magnet and a permanent backlink.

  40h·how to do it