Every founder who launches on Product Hunt does it for the first time exactly once, usually badly. They find out about the hunter, the first-hour push, and the comment strategy about a day too late.
The idea is a Google Sheet that lays out the entire launch, from three weeks before to one week after, as a checklist with dates, owners, and tactics. Sell it to the next founder before their launch day.
This is one of the 100 business ideas in Google Sheets I published, and it's a good example of a checklist that becomes valuable because of what's attached to it.
The idea
The idea is to create a step-by-step guide that covers everything from preparing the product for launch, to promoting it on social media, to what to do after the launch. And the tactics and strategies that others employ.
A bare checklist is the skeleton. Prepare the tagline, the gallery images, the first comment, the hunter, the email to your list, the tweets, the post-launch follow-up. That alone would save someone a few hours of reading blog posts.
But the way to add massive value to this resource is to interview successful product launchers. People like Tom and Tibo from TweetHunter, or Victor from Sitekick. Ask what they did in the 48 hours before launch and the 48 hours after. Ask what they'd skip next time.
And interview people who worked at Product Hunt as well. They've seen thousands of launches and know which behaviors actually help and which ones get a product quietly buried.
Interviews on a new tab would make this checklist insanely valuable. The checklist tells you what to do. The interviews tell you why, and what happens when you don't.
If someone bought this resource and could create their own tactical operations for the next two to three weeks to get a great launch, you would be their hero. That's the bar. Not "here are some tips," but "open this on Monday and you'll know what to do every day until launch."
The checklist also ages well. Product Hunt changes its rules and its ranking every so often, and founders will pay for a version that's current.
How to build it in Google Sheets
Tabs
- Setup: Launch Date, Product Name, Hunter, team members. Everything else calculates from the launch date.
- Checklist: one row per task. Days Before Launch, Due Date, Task, Owner, Category, Done checkbox, Notes, and a link to the relevant interview or tactic.
- Tactics: one row per tactic. Name, Who Used It, What It Does, Effort, Impact, Source.
- Interviews: one row per interview. Person, Product, Launch Result, and the full Q and A in a few long cells.
- Launch Day: an hour-by-hour plan for the 24 hours, with checkboxes.
Features to use
-
Named ranges for the launch date so every Due Date formula is readable:
=LaunchDate - A2, where column A holds Days Before Launch. - Checkboxes on every task. A checklist without checkboxes is a document.
- Conditional formatting that highlights tasks due today, and greys out tasks that are done.
- Data validation dropdowns for Owner, so a team of three can divide the work without a meeting.
- FILTER on a Today view that shows only what's due in the next 48 hours and isn't checked off.
- Apps Script with a time-driven trigger plus MailApp to email each owner every morning with their tasks for the day. This is what turns a sheet into a launch coordinator.
Build the Checklist tab first with 40 to 60 tasks. Then add the Tactics and Interviews tabs, and link each task to the reason it exists.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is a founder or a marketer at a small startup with a launch on the calendar. They're paying for confidence. They know a launch is a one-shot event, and a small price to skip the guesswork is nothing next to the cost of a flat launch.
Price the sheet as a one-time purchase, $29 to $79. The interviews justify the top of that range. If you keep interviewing launchers and updating the tactics as Product Hunt changes, sell yearly access instead and treat each new interview as a reason to email past buyers.
Gumroad works for a one-time sale with a copy-this-sheet link. To sell live access to a sheet that keeps improving, with sharing handled the moment someone pays, use OnlySheets.
The service upgrade is a launch review. For a fee, look at their tagline, gallery, and first comment, and hand back notes. The checklist finds the buyers, and the review finds the ones who want more.
For the first ten customers, find founders who've announced an upcoming launch on Twitter or in indie hacker communities. They're easy to find, because they tell everyone. Send the sheet to a few of them free, ask for feedback, and ask them to mention it in their launch retrospective. Founders read retrospectives.
Related ideas from the list
- Landing Page Checklist, the checklist a founder needs the week before this one.
- Media to Pitch Contact List, the press side of the same launch, and a natural extra tab.
- Physical Product Promotion Tactics, the same tactics-collection mechanic for a different kind of launch.
Want the other 99? This is one idea from my list of 100 business ideas you can build in Google Sheets. Get all 100 business ideas as a free Google Sheet.
And if you want to learn how to package and sell spreadsheets, my course Selling Spreadsheets walks through exactly that.