What is a SaaS launch checklist?

A SaaS launch checklist is the ordered list of work between "the product is live" and "the product has customers" — measurement, positioning, trust, payment, distribution and channel selection, in the sequence where each step makes the next one possible. It is not a launch-day list. Launch day is one step of the 305 here, and most of what determines whether it works happened in the weeks before it.

What should I do first after my product goes live?

Make the product measurable before you market it. Install analytics, define six core events (signup started, signup completed, activated, trial started, subscribed, cancelled), and verify each one fires in a real incognito session. Every decision in every later phase is a guess until this exists.

How long does it take to get from launch to $1M ARR?

There is no honest calendar answer, which is why this plan gates on evidence rather than dates. Each phase ends on a fact — ten paying customers, domain rating 20, one channel producing 40% of signups — and you move on when that fact is true, not when a week elapses. Most B2B web apps that reach $1M ARR take two to four years.

How do I get my first 10 paying customers?

By hand, one at a time, from a list of 100 named people rather than a description of an audience. Build the list in four blocks of 25: your own network, people who described this exact problem in a community in the last 90 days, authors of 2- and 3-star reviews of the incumbent, and anyone with a live trigger event such as a relevant hire or a migration announcement. Then do the outreach yourself. Founder-sent messages beat everything else at this stage, and they teach you the objections you will spend the next year answering.

Which directories should I submit my SaaS to?

Work top-down by domain rating and expect about three hours per batch. AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Slashdot and Software Advice carry most of your first 30 referring domains. Some are nofollow — AlternativeTo among them — and are still worth it, because they rank for "[competitor] alternatives" and are read heavily by answer engines. Keep a tracker with the directory, date, listing URL, status and whether dofollow was verified; you will be back in it quarterly.

How do I raise domain rating to 20?

Build the destination pages first — alternative pages, use-case pages, one free tool — then submit to roughly 30 directories in one afternoon: AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Slashdot, Software Advice and the long tail. Claim Crunchbase, LinkedIn and Wikidata for entity resolution, then pitch 20 "best of" listicles for inclusion. Verify each listing is dofollow afterwards.

Should I build backlinks or content first?

Neither, in isolation — build the pages the links will point at, then go and get the links. Submitting to directories before your alternative pages, use-case pages and free tool exist wastes the listing, because the link lands on a page that converts nobody and ranks for nothing. This is the one ordering in the plan that is genuinely non-negotiable, and it is the mistake most often made in reverse.

Should I launch on Product Hunt?

Yes, but the prep is the launch. Warm your account with three thoughtful comments a day for two weeks, create the Upcoming page 14 days out and drive traffic to it, and go live at 12:01 AM Pacific on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Ask for feedback, never for upvotes — the current algorithm weights comment quality above upvote count.

How many marketing channels should I run at once?

Five for four weeks, then one. Run a channel tournament with a written pass mark per channel, score each on signups, cost per acquisition, effort and ceiling, then kill the bottom three and triple the volume on the winner. Almost every company under $10k MRR is carried by exactly one channel.

What is a channel tournament?

Five candidate channels, four weeks, one scorecard, no sentiment. You pick the five where your customers already gather rather than the five you are most comfortable posting on, write down what counts as a pass for each before you start, run them at equal effort, then score and kill the bottom three. The channel that carried you into the tournament competes in it like everything else — otherwise you are only testing around the bet you already placed.

How do I know which marketing channel is actually working?

Ask the people who signed up, and instrument the rest. A one-question "how did you hear about us?" field on signup catches what analytics cannot see — podcasts, private communities, word of mouth — and UTM tagging plus first-touch capture catches what people misremember. Run both. Neither is trustworthy alone, and until you have them the channel tournament has nothing to score.

When should I start SEO for a new SaaS?

After you have ten paying customers, not before. SEO compounds, which is exactly why it is the wrong first move: it pays back over quarters, and before product-market fit you do not yet know which words are worth ranking for. What you should do on day one is make the site crawlable and citable so that nothing blocks the compounding once you start it.

Do I need a blog to grow a SaaS?

Not at the start, and not as a blog. What earns traffic early are pages with commercial intent — alternative pages against your top four competitors, one page per use case in the customer's own vocabulary, and a free tool. Comparison pages convert at 5–15% against 0.5–2% for generic content. Industrialised publishing belongs in phase 5, once a channel has proven it pays.

What does "done" mean for a phase in this plan?

A fact about the world, not a set of ticked boxes. Phase 1 ends when a stranger can find, understand, try and pay for the product and you can watch them do it. Phase 2 ends at ten paying customers you can each name a source for. Phase 3 ends at domain rating 20, 30 referring domains, 50 indexed pages and one launch moment shipped. You can tick every box in a phase and still not be done, which is the point.

the launch plan

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

A free SaaS launch checklist in six phases: 402 nodes and 325 concrete steps, in the order that actually works for a B2B or B2C web app. Most take under an hour; a few are a week’s project, and each one says which. No signup, no email.

By The Marketinque TeamReviewed September 2026

Your progress

0/0 steps done · 0% of the work

Ticks are saved in this browser only — no account, no email, nothing sent anywhere. Tick everything that describes what you’re building and the plan dims the steps that don’t apply to you.

How to use this

Phases gate on evidence, not dates. Move on when the phase’s “done when” is factually true.
Order matters where it says it does. An “after 2.1” note is real sequencing — submitting to directories before the destination pages exist wastes the listing.
Skipping is a valid answer.Tell the filter above what you’re building and the steps that don’t apply dim out.
“How to do it” links into the plays library. This page says what and when; a play says how.

SaaS launch questions

What is a SaaS launch checklist?: A SaaS launch checklist is the ordered list of work between "the product is live" and "the product has customers" — measurement, positioning, trust, payment, distribution and channel selection, in the sequence where each step makes the next one possible. It is not a launch-day list. Launch day is one step of the 305 here, and most of what determines whether it works happened in the weeks before it.
What should I do first after my product goes live?: Make the product measurable before you market it. Install analytics, define six core events (signup started, signup completed, activated, trial started, subscribed, cancelled), and verify each one fires in a real incognito session. Every decision in every later phase is a guess until this exists.
How long does it take to get from launch to $1M ARR?: There is no honest calendar answer, which is why this plan gates on evidence rather than dates. Each phase ends on a fact — ten paying customers, domain rating 20, one channel producing 40% of signups — and you move on when that fact is true, not when a week elapses. Most B2B web apps that reach $1M ARR take two to four years.
How do I get my first 10 paying customers?: By hand, one at a time, from a list of 100 named people rather than a description of an audience. Build the list in four blocks of 25: your own network, people who described this exact problem in a community in the last 90 days, authors of 2- and 3-star reviews of the incumbent, and anyone with a live trigger event such as a relevant hire or a migration announcement. Then do the outreach yourself. Founder-sent messages beat everything else at this stage, and they teach you the objections you will spend the next year answering.
Which directories should I submit my SaaS to?: Work top-down by domain rating and expect about three hours per batch. AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Slashdot and Software Advice carry most of your first 30 referring domains. Some are nofollow — AlternativeTo among them — and are still worth it, because they rank for "[competitor] alternatives" and are read heavily by answer engines. Keep a tracker with the directory, date, listing URL, status and whether dofollow was verified; you will be back in it quarterly.
How do I raise domain rating to 20?: Build the destination pages first — alternative pages, use-case pages, one free tool — then submit to roughly 30 directories in one afternoon: AlternativeTo, SaaSHub, G2, Capterra, SourceForge, Slashdot, Software Advice and the long tail. Claim Crunchbase, LinkedIn and Wikidata for entity resolution, then pitch 20 "best of" listicles for inclusion. Verify each listing is dofollow afterwards.
Should I build backlinks or content first?: Neither, in isolation — build the pages the links will point at, then go and get the links. Submitting to directories before your alternative pages, use-case pages and free tool exist wastes the listing, because the link lands on a page that converts nobody and ranks for nothing. This is the one ordering in the plan that is genuinely non-negotiable, and it is the mistake most often made in reverse.
Should I launch on Product Hunt?: Yes, but the prep is the launch. Warm your account with three thoughtful comments a day for two weeks, create the Upcoming page 14 days out and drive traffic to it, and go live at 12:01 AM Pacific on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Ask for feedback, never for upvotes — the current algorithm weights comment quality above upvote count.
How many marketing channels should I run at once?: Five for four weeks, then one. Run a channel tournament with a written pass mark per channel, score each on signups, cost per acquisition, effort and ceiling, then kill the bottom three and triple the volume on the winner. Almost every company under $10k MRR is carried by exactly one channel.
What is a channel tournament?: Five candidate channels, four weeks, one scorecard, no sentiment. You pick the five where your customers already gather rather than the five you are most comfortable posting on, write down what counts as a pass for each before you start, run them at equal effort, then score and kill the bottom three. The channel that carried you into the tournament competes in it like everything else — otherwise you are only testing around the bet you already placed.
How do I know which marketing channel is actually working?: Ask the people who signed up, and instrument the rest. A one-question "how did you hear about us?" field on signup catches what analytics cannot see — podcasts, private communities, word of mouth — and UTM tagging plus first-touch capture catches what people misremember. Run both. Neither is trustworthy alone, and until you have them the channel tournament has nothing to score.
When should I start SEO for a new SaaS?: After you have ten paying customers, not before. SEO compounds, which is exactly why it is the wrong first move: it pays back over quarters, and before product-market fit you do not yet know which words are worth ranking for. What you should do on day one is make the site crawlable and citable so that nothing blocks the compounding once you start it.
Do I need a blog to grow a SaaS?: Not at the start, and not as a blog. What earns traffic early are pages with commercial intent — alternative pages against your top four competitors, one page per use case in the customer's own vocabulary, and a free tool. Comparison pages convert at 5–15% against 0.5–2% for generic content. Industrialised publishing belongs in phase 5, once a channel has proven it pays.
What does "done" mean for a phase in this plan?: A fact about the world, not a set of ticked boxes. Phase 1 ends when a stranger can find, understand, try and pay for the product and you can watch them do it. Phase 2 ends at ten paying customers you can each name a source for. Phase 3 ends at domain rating 20, 30 referring domains, 50 indexed pages and one launch moment shipped. You can tick every box in a phase and still not be done, which is the point.

Want the plan to check itself?

This page is the whole plan and it stays free. Inside marketinque the same tree runs against your project: steps verify themselves where they can, locked steps stay locked until their prerequisites are genuinely done, and the engine turns the next unlocked ones into researched, ready-to-post ideas.

Join the waitlist

Sources

Google, Search Central: SEO documentation & quality guidelines
Google, Optimizing for generative AI features on Google Search (Google Search Central)
Reddit, Reddit Rules (spam & manipulation policy) (Reddit, Inc.)
Reddit, What is the Contributor Quality Score? (Reddit Help)
David Skok, SaaS Metrics 2.0 (forEntrepreneurs)
Andreessen Horowitz, 16 Startup Metrics (2015)
Jake Ward, How to win search in 2026 (Google, AI & everywhere else) (X, 2026)
David Ch, I studied 30,600 apps making $20k-100k/mo+, the method is stupidly easy (X, 2026)

Compiled by The Marketinque Team to our editorial standards.

Your progress

How to use this

Ship-ready

1.1Make every visit measurable

1.1.1Install analytics and define your events

1.1.2Define the funnel you will actually optimise

1.2Make the offer legible in five seconds

1.2.1Nail the positioning

1.2.2Fix everything above the fold

1.2.3Publish a real pricing page

1.2.4Read the market that already pays

1.3Make the site crawlable and citable

1.3.1Clear the technical baseline

1.3.2Ship structured data

1.3.3Get ready to be quoted by answer engines

1.4Clear the trust bar

1.5Make it possible to pay you

1.6Own your channels before you need them

First 10 paying customers

2.1Build a list of 100 named humans

2.2Do the outreach yourself

2.2.1Work the warm list first

2.2.2Run cold outreach that is specific

2.2.3Show up where they already are

2.3Talk to every single user

2.4Make the first session succeed

2.5Harvest proof while you still know everyone

Authority baseline

3.1Build the pages the links will point at

3.1.1Publish alternative pages for your top competitors

3.1.2Publish use-case and audience pages

3.2Raise Domain Rating to 20

3.2.1Prepare the submission kit

3.2.2Submit to software and SaaS directories

3.2.3Claim the entity profiles that feed AI training data

3.2.4Claim high-DR profile and content platforms

3.2.5Submit to AI tool directoriesAI product

3.2.6List on agent and MCP registriesMCP / agents

3.2.7Get included in “best of” listicles

3.2.8Reclaim links you have already earned

3.2.9Submit to no-code directoriesno-code

3.2.10Register the blog and syndicate milestones

3.2.11Verify and maintain the link profile

The directory index: all 975

3.3Get indexed at scale

3.4Become citable by answer engines

3.5Run the launch moment

3.5.1Run the three-week Product Hunt prep

3.5.2Execute launch day

3.5.3Echo the launch everywhere else

3.6Run the 10-in-30 review driveB2B

3.7Build consumer review proofB2C

3.8Publish the founding content set

3.8.6Mine Search Console for the queries you already half-rank for

3.9Win the store listingmobile app

3.10Work the sources that already decide the answer

Find the one channel that works

4.1Know where signups actually come from

4.2Run the channel tournament

4.3Double down on the winner

4.4Convert the traffic you already have

4.5Build the founder channel

4.6Start the owned list

Compounding engine

5.1Industrialise content

5.1.8Take the same intent map to YouTube search

5.1.10Test content formats the way you test keywordsB2C

5.2Build pages at scale

5.3Automate the lifecycle

5.4Build the referral loops

5.5Borrow other people’s audiences

5.6Stop being the bottleneck

Scale to $1M ARR

6.1Fix the leaky bucket first

6.2Grow revenue per customer

6.3Turn on paid, with a payback rule

6.4Open a second segment

6.4.5Open a language market

6.5Add sales assist for larger dealsB2B

6.6Own the category term