You finished the build. The repo works, the demo's smooth, and you've told exactly 3 people about it. If you're searching for how to launch your MVP, here's the uncomfortable truth up front: building was the easy part. AI tools made writing the code nearly free, which means the thing separating your project from a live product isn't more features — it's Stripe, a domain, transactional email, analytics, a landing page that converts, and a plan for where users actually come from. None of that is glamorous. All of it is mandatory. Most launch advice skips it because "set up DNS" doesn't get retweets. This is the checklist for the part nobody writes about, in the order that actually works.
Step 1: get paid before you get fancy
Wire payments first, not last. Builders defer Stripe because it feels like a problem for "when there are users," but a product that can't take money can't tell you anything. A signup is a compliment; a charge is a signal.
The minimum: a Stripe account, 1 product, 1 price, and a checkout link or embedded checkout. Skip the billing portal, coupons, and metered usage for now. Stripe Checkout handles tax forms, card storage, and receipts so you don't have to. Budget roughly an afternoon if you've done it before — closer to 2 days if you haven't, because the webhook handling (checkout completed, payment failed, subscription canceled) is where everyone trips. Test it in live mode with your own card. A surprising number of "launched" products have never processed a real charge.
If you're unsure what to charge, pick a number and ship it. Pricing is a dial, not a tattoo — we cover the reasoning in pricing your first product.
Step 2: domain, DNS, and email that actually delivers
Buy the domain. Not the perfect domain — a domain. A .com or .app that's spelled the way it sounds beats a clever pun you'll explain forever. Expect roughly $10–50/year depending on the TLD — registrar pricing varies, so check before you commit.
Then the part that quietly kills launches: DNS and email deliverability. Point your A or CNAME records at your host, turn on HTTPS, and verify the apex and www both resolve. Then set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records for your sending domain. Skip those 3 and your password resets land in spam — which reads to the user as "this product is broken," and they're not wrong.
You need transactional email on day 1: signup confirmation, password reset, receipt. Resend, Postmark, or SES all work; pick one and send from a subdomain like mail.yourapp.com so a marketing mistake later doesn't torch your transactional reputation. Send yourself every email your app can produce and read them on a phone. This step takes an hour and most builders have never done it.
Step 3: analytics, or you're launching blind
Before the first visitor arrives, instrument 4 events: visit, signup, activation (the first moment of real value — file uploaded, project created, whatever it is for you), and payment. That's it. Not 40 events. 4.
PostHog's free tier covers this comfortably for a new product; Plausible plus a few custom events works too. The point isn't the tool — it's that when you launch and "nothing happens," you can tell the difference between no traffic, traffic that bounces, and signups that never activate. Those are 3 completely different problems with 3 completely different fixes, and without instrumentation they all look identical: silence. We go deep on this in do you know your funnel performance? — read it before launch day, not after.
Add error tracking (Sentry's free tier is fine) while you're in there. Your first real users will hit bugs you can't reproduce, and "it doesn't work" emails are useless without a stack trace.
Step 4: a landing page that converts, not a brochure
Your landing page has 1 job: get the right visitor to take 1 action. The structure that works is boring and proven — a headline that names the outcome in the visitor's words, a subhead that says who it's for, 1 visual of the actual product, 3 short blocks on the painful problem you solve, the price, and a single CTA repeated 2–3 times down the page.
What kills conversion: vague headlines ("Supercharge your workflow"), 6 competing CTAs, no price, and screenshots of empty states. Name the pain in the words your user would type into Google — that's also your SEO foundation, for free.
One honest test before launch: show the page to someone in your target audience for 5 seconds, hide it, and ask what the product does and who it's for. If they can't answer both, rewrite the headline before you touch anything else.
Step 5: the distribution plan — where day-1 users actually come from
"Launch" is not a tweet. A launch without a distribution plan is a deploy with extra steps. Before you announce anything, write down 3 specific channels where your users already gather and what you'll post in each — a subreddit, a niche community, a directory, a Hacker News Show HN, an X thread, a cold-email list of 20 people who have the problem.
Then sequence it across 2 weeks, not 1 day. Day 1: the community where you have the most standing. Day 3: directories and listing sites. Week 2: the bigger swing (Show HN, Product Hunt) once you've fixed the bugs the first wave found. Spreading it out turns 1 spike into a feedback loop.
If you can't name 3 channels you can realistically reach, that's not a launch problem — it's a product-selection problem, and it's worth confronting head-on. We wrote about exactly this in distribution before you build.
The honest math on doing all this yourself
Add it up: payments with real webhook handling, domain and DNS, deliverable email, analytics, error tracking, a converting page, legal basics, and a 2-week distribution sequence. For a builder doing it the first time, that's typically a few weekends of work — and it's the exact stretch where most side projects stall, because every hour of plumbing is an hour not spent on the part you actually enjoy.
That gap — between finished code and a live, operated product — is the entire reason LaunchBuddy exists. It's a launch studio: you submit your unlaunched project, and if we pick it, we build it onto our harness — payments, auth, email, analytics, domain, cost caps already wired and tested — ship it live, and operate the growth. You keep ownership the whole way; you pay a flat fee or share revenue, and you can kill or port out anytime.
If your MVP is rotting in a tab, get a free honest assessment. If it's a no, you get the why — specific reasons, not a form letter. It takes 60 seconds to submit at launchbuddy.app.