When is the best time to launch? season? month? day of week?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3416264

by cioc • 15 years ago

3 4 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

To maximize success, when should you launch your startup? Is there a best time of year? Do certain months have advantages? Days of week? Times of day? Any amount if detail is valuable.

stray• 15 years ago

It should happen by accident, when one person says "lunch" and the other person thinks he said "launch".

karterk• 15 years ago

Launch to who? To press? To end users? You should ideally not have anything called a "launch" at all. Start showing the prototype as early as possible to potential users and refine it along the way. There is no golden launch season. It's a process, not an event.

jiggity• 15 years ago

Cioc, it depends on what type of "launch" you are talking about.

If you mean the first time showing your product to users, you don't need an official "launch". You should be constantly posting about your startup in circles where your userbase resides.

Starting from scratch, it's hard enough to get a decent number of users to care. You shouldn't restrict yourself to trying to get a lot of users in a short burst. The goal here is to incrementally grow out the feature set as well as the userbase.

If you are talking about the big tech publication launch, it should happen when you are sure your product is magnificent and you are confident that people will love the novelty / utility / efficiency. You have to somehow convince tech publications that you are interesting. You don't want to mess up by having them visit a substandard product and establishing a bad impression.

Note that if your targeted audience is not tech, what you are doing with tech publication launches is building brand familiarity with investors. This is a different aim than blowing up your user count, but is an important goal nevertheless.

I think a big source of confusion is the term "launch". It somehow predicates that in the pre-state, there are zero users and in the post-state, there is either a huge number of users if your startup is a success or a low number of users if your startup is a failure.

I like to think of launches as a way to get a nice boost up in user count or awareness on top of the incremental increase.

You should know before you "launch" whether it will be a successful or not.

patio10• 15 years ago

Your best chance for success will be at 4:00 PST on a Tuesday as close to March 27th as possible.

When is the best time to launch? season? month? day of week?

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