What is the right order to launch a small product?

Launch warm to cold. The room where people already know your name goes first, on day one, with your best post and you in the thread all day. Strangers come after, over the following week, because what they react to is whether anybody else seems to care.

My worst launch was my most organised

I had a list of 20 places to announce a tool that explained database structures in plain words, sorted from biggest to smallest. At the bottom, as an afterthought, was a small developer forum where I'd spent 2 years answering questions and where several people would have recognised my name.

I started at the top. My post sat on the biggest site's second page for about 40 minutes and vanished. By the end of day 1 I'd posted in 11 places and was tired, embarrassed and quietly sure the product was the problem.

On day 3 I got to the forum. I wrote the post in 5 minutes, because by then I'd written it 11 times and stopped believing in it. The people who knew me read a tired post from a man who didn't seem to believe in his own product. They were right.

Why the order matters

A launch is the one moment a small product has any momentum. Cold rooms decide what to think partly by whether anybody else cares. Start cold, and they have nothing to react to. By the time you reach the warm room, you're cold yourself.

Start warm, and the first replies, a customer or two, a sentence somebody says about it in public, become what the next room reacts to.

What warm to cold looks like

1. Before launch: message the 10 people in your warm room whose problems fit, one by one.
2. Day 1: the warm room, with the post you'd be proudest of. Stay in the thread all day.
3. Days 2 to 7: one room a day, moving outwards, each able to see the room before it cared.
4. Week 2 onwards: go back to the warm room with something useful, so day 2 has somebody in it.

If you don't have a warm room

Then that's the work, before the product. Find the place where your customers talk and become known there: answer questions, be useful, for months. It's slower than launching. It's also the only launch that has ever worked for me.

Nobody Bought It has the full autopsy of that launch. The graveyard has 8 more products nobody heard about.