Surviving a big launch

What is a big launch?

A "big launch" is not just a regular event, it's a converging point of many months of effort from everyone in a company. Engineering, marketing, public relations, legal — all teams are involved. Everyone works towards making it as smooth and loud as possible.

Massive coverage in online and traditional media, as well as social media (and sometimes ads) will lead to massive spike in traffic. Which drives attention to every page of a website.

How to prepare

Your website is the core component of a big launch. It serves as the starting point for anyone looking to get involved and is the primary channel for communicating with your audience. Here are some of the major steps to take before a launch.

Gather your team in one place

Nothing beats real-time in-person collaboration during a launch. Having your core team available and accessible, seating in the war room, ensures swift responses to issues as they arise. Time is crucial during a launch—addressing issues or outages within minutes, rather than hours, can make a colossal difference.

Host your website on a managed platform

A big launch is not the right time to test a fancy tech stack, or prove that in-house built and maintained web-hosting can handle huge influx of traffic! A managed hosting provider offers the support and infrastructure to handle traffic spikes, you can never build alone such an infrastructure. It's simply their business to keep websites running, no matter what.

Notify your vendors

Make sure all third-party vendors — including payment processors, analytics tools, and APIs — are in the loop, and won't be surprised. Card-processing vendors, in particular, must be ready for the increased volume to prevent their risk analysis tools from triggering false alarms. Surprises are great for marketing, not for your vendors.

Proofread the content

Before giving away copies to your users, read them yourself. All of them. Ask your team to read the copies backward, starting from the last word and moving to the first. This is quite a famous technique to spot awkward phrases, which not be noticed in normal reading. Don't neglect such pages as the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These pages may not get much traffic, but they officially represent your company and have legal power.

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What to avoid

There are two most important things which should definitely be avoided during a big launch event.

Perfection

Perfectionism can paralyze your team. Constantly refining and reworking your site or product can waste critical time leading up to the launch. Strive for high quality, but accept that perfection is unattainable. Instead, focus on delivering a reliable and user-friendly experience. Incremental, thoughtful improvements should be planned post-launch.

Unproven vendors

Don't put your event in the hands of a popular but unproven tool or vendor, even if they are industry's rising stars with tons of flashy marketing materials. Inexperienced or niche vendors are almost always less reliable, and don't scale well. They often perform well under low or even moderate load, but start failing or glitching when the load heavily increases.

To recap

Always start preparing for your launch well in advance. It's ridiculous how quickly small issues can escalate into critical problems if overlooked. Your team should remain motivated and focused — it's wise to have as many eyes on the product as possible. Don't try to be too smart about your event, but don't underestimate the challenges either. Prepare plan B to mitigate the worst possible outcome.