Your product is almost ready, you are planning the launch party and the team is excited. But weeks go by and one thing comes up after another blocking you from the long-awaited "GO" decision: support team is not ready, the layout is broken on mobile, and the lawyers are calling about missing policies. And then you launch and the customers are just not coming and you have no visibility into why.

In more than 10 years helping companies launch, I've seen brilliant products fail not because the tech wasn't good enough, but because teams overlooked the unglamorous essentials and seemingly small details that actually make launches work.

Technology Rarely Stops a Launch

Businesses don't fail to launch because of low test coverage or a bad programming language. I have seen dozens of companies obsess over the performance or security of a feature for months burning through their funding only to realise customers needed something completely different. Sometimes the product would get a 40% boost in users by simply introducing a better customer support form.

Most often, I see a product's early success determined by execution, not innovation. The line between success and a wasted opportunity often lies in all the seemingly small and mundane pieces required to run a business that most founders take for granted or don't even know they need.

Founders have enough to think about creatively when bringing a new digital product into the world. So here's my go-to list of 10 questions I help with every business I work with answer before launching.

GO or NO GO: How do we decide WHEN to launch?

Any team of founder launching a digital product must have a clear framework for deciding when to pull the trigger and go live - a "Go / No Go" framework. I have seen many leaders launch too late because of not having such a decision framework and falling back to waiting longer. I have seen a CEO miss out on 3 months of peak user engagement time because they felt the registration form needed more polish. Without a clear decision framework, they couldn't weigh the real cost - 3 months of peak engagement - against the perceived benefit of a polished registration flow.

I start coaching my clients with using the simplest decision framework: "If THIS was the only thing not ready, would you delay the launch by a month?" Most of the time, that registration form polish doesn't feel worth a month delay, but fixing the broken checkout flow absolutely does.

Once they apply the "month-delay" test, here's how I help them dig deeper:

• If people really want to use your product, will animation glitches on the registration form make them lose interest? Maybe the product isn't as good!
• How big of a risk are you facing? Do you have to eliminate the risk or can you manage or accept it?
• Does this absolutely have to be done now or can you continue working on it while getting feedback from real users?
• Is this something that can be handled manually/through customer support or perhaps fixed later? Early adopters are often very understanding.
• If this isn't perfect now, is it devastating for the business or can you easily correct it in the future?

Not every founder or exec will have the knowledge and confidence to answer all these questions alone, especially in highly regulated or complex businesses. I've successfully used the same framework with executive teams, and teams actually make it work better - experienced leaders with deep knowledge of their respective areas tend to ask the right questions and challenge each other's assumptions.

Legal Documents and Tools: Are we legally ready to do business?

Raise your hand if you like writing standard legal documents! My hand is certainly down - and I have legal education and 5 years of experience as a lawyer before starting my career in technology.

Boring as they are, foundational legal documents serve you, as the business owner or exec, in two ways:

• save you from fines, court costs or even jail time
• help clarify exactly what you offer, what customers can expect, what is out of scope, and how to interact with your services.

This article does not constitute legal advice and most of the time it's a good idea to consult a legal advisor who understands your business type and location. The good news is - most businesses need only a few legal essentials to sensibly launch an online product:

• Terms of service - or Terms and Conditions, explain exactly what to expect from your online product or service and forms the basis of your contractual relationship with the customer. You can read through our Terms and Conditions for inspiration, these have been written specifically for Innovective and not AI generated.
• Privacy policy - Tell your users what you do with their data. The European Union and California, USA are already very serious about data protection and more jurisdictions are joining. Consumers are becoming more aware of their privacy rights and expect privacy to be treated with respect. Even if none of them challenge you legally, by ignoring privacy you risk losing customers.
• Subprocessor details - Transparently tell your users if you are sharing their data with third parties (like online platforms, social media etc), why and how. If you use Stripe for payments or Mailchimp for newsletters, tell your customers you're sharing their data with these businesses. As with the privacy policy, customers are becoming more demanding and expect disclosure even if it is not a legal requirement in their jurisdiction.
• Data Protection contacts - Help your customers reach out to the right person or team about their data privacy. Having the DPO - Data Protection Officer contact published is a requirement in the EU and UK but also an easy mechanism to set up globally. This can be as simple as an alias to your support email address - [email protected].
• Cookie and privacy management - The simplest explanation is - you must allow users to choose whether you use their data for non-essential services and whether you store data on their device which helps track them. You don't need to learn the mechanics of it but to ensure this is thought about. Surprisingly, many business owners and execs still get caught out by these basics.
• Copyright notices - Make it clear if your publicly accessible intellectual property can be used by others and under what terms. A simple notice that content can only be used or reproduced with your explicit permission can go a long way.

Analytics: How will we measure success and know where to focus?

As a leader you deserve to know more about your product's performance than the number of visits a page got or the total sales amount. So many teams think that plugging in a standard analytics script and exporting sales data into a spreadsheet is enough but there is so much you can easily do from the very beginning.

In 2025 most analytics platforms have a generous free plan to host and visualise your data. What you need to do is think what questions you want to answer about your business and ensure you can answer them with customer data.

No need to get advanced, a simple question - "How many visits does our About page get?" - can tell you whether you want to invest in better brand messaging and a better About page.

You can also get quite scientific and purposefully configure tests to compare multiple marketing campaigns.

What is crucial is ensuring you have the mechanism and framework to collect and analyse user data from day one. While product features can easily be built tomorrow, behavioural data not collected today cannot be recovered tomorrow.

Decide early what questions about user behaviour you want answered to make your business decisions and configure your analytics to capture that data from day one. Even if you don't have staff with relevant expertise free user guides for tools like Amplitude can teach you basic best practices.

Systems Monitoring: What happens if our systems go down?

Systems break, so will your product, and it's OK if you are prepared. Asking IF a product will go down is naive, the best way you can prepare is asking WHEN your product is down and how you will find out and recover. I have seen established businesses rely on their more tech-savvy business partners to tell them when they are down and there are easy ways to be better than that.

Regardless of whether you are an enterprise with incident management processes set up or a startup with zero operating experience, here are three simple questions to help you build resilient operations:

• How will we know if our systems are down and need intervention to fix?
• What does it mean for our systems to be "fully up and running"? How do we define 'working' vs 'broken'?
• Who are the people capable of rebuilding out systems in case of a disaster?

It is possible to launch a product without systems monitoring, same as it is possible to take off on a plane without a dashboard. The consequences of a digital product crash are not as devastating as those of a plane crash but the mechanichs will be similar.

Time-Sensitive Configuration: Have we set up everything that takes weeks to work?

When you are ready to launch this same day, the last thing you want is to perform a 1-minute final touch and wait a week or more for results. Teams often forget that while they may be fast, agile and nimble, the systems, protocols and partners they rely on are not.

The top dependencies I have seen derail or delay otherwise successful launches are:

• DNS changes - and the time they take to propagate
• Email domain reputation - often completely overlooked, but essential if you plan to send transactional emails that actually reach customers' inboxes
• Certificate activation and renewal - especially for mobile app stores
• Partner API integration readiness - you're ready to go but your partner isn't
• Regulatory sign-off - you should be ready to go but the regulator SME is on annual leave.

As consumers we are used to everything being available online and 24/7, but for important milestones planning with extra caution can save the disappointment of costly delays.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): How will people discover our product?

"We launched, users came and all lived happily ever after" - does that sum up your plan to get the product discovered? I hope not! Assuming you have a fantastic product, you have nailed all the previous steps and have a fantastic team to run the digital business, none of it will matter if users don't know you exist.

It is fine to rely on organic discovery of your business instead of ads as long as you put effort into Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in advance. At a minimum you should:

• Create free SEO analytics accounts like the Google Search Console
• Ensure your product has a sitemap and upload it to Google Search Console and similar. Write clear, descriptive page titles and descriptions for your key pages.
• Try to find your product in search engines, check what the search results look like and make them look better

Most importantly - don't leave this to chance, this is not 1998 when a static HTML page of a local comic shop would be the hottest thing and No 1 search result to anything. "If you build it, they will come" has unfortunately stopped working long ago.

Social Media: What's our plan for social media?

Don't let social media fool you into believing it is easy, accessible to anyone and beginner friendly just because getting started is free. Customers expect your business to have social accounts with regular, engaging content across multiple platforms. Unless you are planning to pay for completely outsourcing social media presence, prepare to answer some questions.

1. What will you use social platforms for? - Will you simply post updates to your followers on the latest news, initiatives and offers? Will you market your product organically? Will you buy ads? Will you invite customers to reach your support team on socials?
2. What are your account names? - You might think you will get your company name as a handle on each platform but the space is so crowded now that unless you have a trademark registered, you will have to be creative to find a name that customers will find you by.
3. Who is going to monitor and manage engagement on your socials? - You have posted an update on Instagram and now 300 users are writing you comments and DMs. Do you know who will engage with these users - respond, filter, moderate. It's OK if you don't have staff to do it, expect to do it yourself.
4. Have you cross-linked all your social accounts and your product website? - Obvious as it is, many owners forget to link all their socials on their website and to interconnect the ones you can.

Social media in 2025 is more complicated than traditional marketing in 2000 and you want to either hire someone experienced to help you start or invest into learning the basic rules.

You Have Launched - Now What?

Founders are usually passionate, so are teams who launch something new. Sometimes they project their own excitement about the product onto their target audience and overestimate the effort users will put in to use the product successfully.

Your users are not fans but simply your customers most of the time. They are far less excited about your product succeeding and more interested in their needs or desires being met or the product making them feel good.

When they land on one of your pages, their thoughts boil down to: "Is this serving me?" and "What do I do for this to make me feel better?" You must answer both questions pretty quickly if you want the customers to stay.

User Guides: How will users know what to do?

Your marketing approach did well and got the right users to visit your product. Your user experience design is generally intuitive. Chances are the users are interested but still unsure what they are supposed to do to live happily ever after.

Here are the 4 customer questions I recommend every product answers upfront:

• What is this product? - More visitors than you think click on the "About Us" page and home to find the vision and story of the product (not corporate boilerplate and the registered office address). A well-articulated message that explains how you serve customers can win or lose a sale. This can be as simple as a short written or video message from the founder or the team as long as it clearly articulates how you plan to make the customer's life better.
• Where do I get started? - Users want your product to fulfil one need or desire but the website is likely to advertise many features on a single page. Users want to know how to get started the same way shoppers want to know where the entrance to the shop is. Unlike physical shops with entrances usually at the storefront, right next to the main window, online products leave the entrance as an afterthought. A simple "Start here" banner leading to the most intuitive way to interact with the product is better than nothing. And no, the 'Log in or Sign up' button is not an entrance but a subscription form, even if it is free.
• How do I use the product to get my desired results? - Remember that your customers didn't build the product together with you and know nothing about how it works. Even gurus of clean intuitive interfaces like Apple create user manuals, step-by-step guides and video tutorials allowing customers to independently learn how to get their needs met with your product. If you think publishing guides is too 2024, you can write knowledge bases for an AI agent to use when your support agents are unavailable.
• What if I get stuck? - Make it easy for users to find help. Unless you are planning to launch your product with zero customer support, make it easy for users to reach said support. Include support information in more places than you think necessary - it will be less obvious for a user where to seek help than you think.

Customer Service: Can customers get help if they need it?

Customers of online products have learned to look for help in standard places and you want to make support available in as many of them as you can afford.

work best such as a Contact page in the footer, social media links (if you respond to messages) in the footer and top navigation, support@, help@ and similar email addresses and ideally a real-time chat widget.

• Footer links - Footers are alive, well and the first place customers look for useful links. Including contact details or a link to a contact page in the footer and making the footer accessible on every page is simple and effective.
• Standard support email addresses - Configure a few standard @yourdomain.com addresses to go to your support team (and you personally as the founder): support@, help@, info@, press@, team@ and hello@ are a few examples.
• Chat widgets - Chat widgets can be a great customer success tool if not configured to be too intrusive. Most online users are familiar with them from other sites and intuitively know what to do. If you need 24/7 support but don't have the staff, there are excellent ways to leverage AI to help users based on your user documentation and policy pages. The cost of such tools is going down rapidly as well. Make sure you are clearly signalling to the customer that they are talking to an AI assistant and not a human.
• Feedback forms and feature requests - Customers expect short and informal feedback loops with service providers. Mechanisms to submit feature requests, bug reports and general feedback are a baseline expectation now. Luckily, there are many platforms offering these capabilities free or for a negligible fee.
• Expectation management - Make sure you set and communicate realistic response times for each support channel. Users can be very understanding as long as you are upfront with your limits. For example, if you are a business based in California, let global customers know to expect longer response times for questions submitted out of California working hours.

Cost Monitoring: Will we know if our costs spiral out of control?

Costs of running a digital product are easy to underestimate and lose track of. It's a good idea to plan cost monitoring, tracking and budgets from the get go to avoid running out of money faster than expected. If you have generous funding it is even easier to dismiss costs that add up but they are likely become a pain ahead of the next round of funding.

Do these things to worry lest about costs and more about launching the business:

• Set up spend limits and/or billing alerts for any pay-as-you-go services including public cloud infrastructure. - You may have a budget in mind based on reasonable user traffic but an error within your application, unexpected usage volume or malicious actors can easily make you go many times over the budget. A service-level circuit break like a spend limit helps minimise the risk.
• Understand how your costs scale - Whether you are a business owner, exec or technical manager, you must understand what influences your digital product costs before you commit to them. Are these fixed costs over a period of time? Do they scale with the number and/or activity of the users? Both? Are there any other factors?
• Keep track of services you depend on and pay for - It is easy, especially at the start up stage, to sign up for many services which solve parts of your business problem without you having to build anything. If not kept in check, over time these services can become major money drains and administrative burden. You may not need to introduce procurement and supplier management procedures for years but keeping your core dependencies organised will ensure no bad surprises.
• Stick to cost models you are comfortable with - The number of custom usage/cost/spend units among digital service platforms is growing faster than the number of cryptocurrencies. You get offers of "5000 extra xUnits if you spend Y" from every vendor and they seem very lucrative. Think about the amount of time it takes you to understand how much your spending and why and whether the lucrative offer compensates for that time. Unlike crypto currencies which at least have a simple exchange rates, SaaS units are usually defined by rather complex T&Cs hard to follow without a dedicated supplier team. Unless you think you can nail managing the complexity, consider choosing vendors with simple pricing models when all else is equal.
• Consider the cost of non-negotiable requirements - When evaluating cost of services, consider whether you have non-negotiable requirements, for example, regulatory or geographical demands which have to be met. Check whether the price you are presented for the service includes that offer or it is premium. I have once supported a very disappointed client when the CMS they were using required a £30,000/year minimum spend to meet their new authentication requirements.

Launching in 2025 is supposed to be simple, isn't it? Technology makes many steps easier, but you're still responsible for the decisions. Being aware of what you need gives you options: take the calculated risk to skip something, or invest in getting it right early. Launching unprepared leaves you with only one option - reacting when things go wrong. The questions above help you stay informed and keep your options open.