Growth marketing for pre-launch startups, executed.

Start the slow things now, not the fast things

Distribution work splits cleanly in two, and pre-launch is the moment to be honest about which half you are doing.

Fast work can be done in a week: a landing page, a launch post, an outreach list, a demo video. Slow work cannot: an account with enough history that a post is not removed on sight, a domain that ranks for anything, a founder who has been saying interesting things long enough that people read the next one.

Pre-launch teams almost always start with the fast work, because the fast work feels like progress and finishes. Then launch day arrives, the fast work goes out, and it goes out to nobody.

What we plan backwards from

These are the planning numbers we work with. They are not measured averages and we would not present them as data. They are the lead times we have found you need to assume when you build a launch schedule backwards from a date.

Read the bottom two rows and the top three rows as different projects. The bottom two are why founders feel busy in launch month. The top three are why launch month does not work.

You have more to say than you think

The standard objection is that there is nothing to talk about yet. No users, no metrics, no screenshots you are willing to show.

True, and it does not matter, because the content that builds a pre-launch audience is not product content. It is the shape of the problem, the constraint you hit that nobody warned you about, the approach that seemed obvious and turned out to be wrong. You are one of very few people who currently holds that material, and none of it requires anything to be shipped.

What you cannot do pre-launch is claim outcomes. So we make the structural argument and leave the numbers out, which is also the only version that survives a reader who has already seen four hundred startup landing pages this year.

The newsletter starts before there is news

Most pre-launch lists are collected and then ignored until launch day, at which point the founder discovers that a list which has never heard from you is a list of strangers.

So the newsletter runs from week four, and every issue has to contain something a reader would forward to a colleague. That is harder than a monthly product update and it is the entire point. The measure is not size, it is whether people open it and reply.

By the time you launch, the list is warm, the accounts have history, and the domain has started to appear for the questions your buyers were already asking.

When we will tell you to wait

If the product is more than nine months from anything usable and you cannot yet describe who it is for in one sentence, distribution work will drift, because there is no audience definition to aim at. In that case the honest answer is to come back when you can name the buyer. We would rather say that on the first call than three months into work that had nothing to point at.