Six Things to Do Before You Go Live

Write Your Positioning Statement

Think of this as the LinkedIn bio for your product.

It has to be punchy, clear, and immediately understood by someone who has never heard of you. It's not a tagline or a mission statement or a paragraph describing your product. It's one or two sentences that make someone say "oh, I know exactly who needs that."

Here's the model we use with clients, because it's easy to remember and feels conversational and not salesy.

"You know how [the problem your user faces]? Well what we do is [your solution], and in fact [social proof or credibility signal]."

When your landing page feels vague, it's usually because this sentence doesn't exist yet. When your pitch feels scattered, this helps you get back to the main idea.

Three things that will sharpen this statement:

The problem has to be specific enough to be felt, not just understood. "Nonprofits struggle with technology" is too broad. "Ministry leaders have to choose between building something custom or settling for software that wasn't designed for them" is specific.

The solution should describe how you're solving their problem, not just listing some. What changes for the user after they start using your product?

The social proof doesn't have to be a big number. A single credible reference point can work.

Write this sentence before you write anything else. Everything downstream borrows from it.

Know Exactly Who You're For

Most teams build a fictional user or an aggregate persona — "Sarah, 38, Marketing Director, values efficiency," and then write their entire launch around someone who doesn't exist.

Meanwhile the real people who would actually use their product are right in front of them, largely ignored. A persona is not the same as a person.

If you're going to launch a business, you need two lists.

The Real 10

The first list is ten real people you already know. Not personas or composites. Actual humans you know by name, talk to regularly, and understand in context. These are real people you're building for, and they're the most valuable resource you have before launch.

To build your Real 10:

• Write down 10 names. People who've engaged with you in some way or people you can get to.
• For each person, capture one concrete challenge, goal, or priority they've shared with you. Even a passing comment counts.
• Note whether they'd take a 20-minute call. That answer will matter when you get to the focus group section.

The patterns that emerge across ten real people are worth more than any persona document. You'll notice the same frustration described in different words, the same workaround being used, the same conference they all attend. Those patterns become your message.

The Dream 100

The second list is the hundred organizations or individuals who represent your ideal customer — the names you want to be in front of when you launch. You may not know these people yet, and that's fine. The point is to get intentional about who they are before you go live, not after.

A founder who launches without a Dream 100 spends their first months figuring out who to talk to. A founder who builds the list now can spend those same months actually talking to them.

Start here:

• Identify the organizations that would benefit most from your product. Be specific about size, type, and context.
• Find the actual decision maker at each one — not the organization in general, but the person who would champion this internally.
• Begin warming those relationships now. A thoughtful LinkedIn connection, a relevant piece of content shared directly, a short personal note. You're not pitching yet. You're showing up before you need something.

By launch day, you want your Dream 100 to already know your name. That's the difference between announcing to a cold audience and launching into a warm one.

If you can't populate either list right now, that's the most important signal you have. It means you need more customer discovery before you launch, not less.

Write Your Manifesto

The manifesto is the document most product teams skip because it feels like something artists do, not builders. That's exactly why it works. When your competitors have a features page and you have a manifesto, you stop competing on features.

A good manifesto does three things: it names the problem with conviction, it tells the story of why you built what you built, and it points toward a better way. It's usually one to three pages. It's written in the founder's voice. And it's honest in a way that marketing copy never quite manages to be.

The structure that works:

• "We built this because we were tired of..." — this is your origin story. The moment you saw the problem clearly. Be specific. Name the frustration. Readers who share it will feel seen immediately.
• "We believe..." — a short list of convictions about how things should work differently. These aren't features. They're principles. Each one should implicitly critique the way things currently are.
• "There ought to be a better way." — the turn. This is where you introduce your product not as a solution but as a response to a broken status quo.
• "So we built [product name]." — land the plane. Brief, confident, grounded.

Good examples to study: the original 37signals manifesto, Patagonia's environmental commitments written in plain language, and any Seth Godin book introduction. Each one takes a clear position, names what's wrong with the current state, and invites a specific kind of reader in while implicitly turning away everyone else.

Your manifesto also becomes the source material for your pitch decks, your landing page, your social content, and every conversation you'll have with press, partners, and investors. Write it once, draw from it everywhere.

Build Your Pitch Deck

Every founder needs a pitch deck. Most founders need three of them.

Start by building one comprehensive master deck — every slide, every talking point, every piece of supporting evidence you have. Think of it as your full product story in one place. You'll probably end up with 30 or 40 slides. That's fine. This is your source material, not the thing you send anyone.

From there, cut it into three targeted versions, each built for a different audience and a different purpose.

The Investor Deck (10–12 slides)

This one is about the opportunity. Problem, solution, market size, traction, team, ask. It assumes a skeptical audience that has seen a hundred decks this week and needs to believe two things: the problem is real and you are the right team to solve it. Build this deck even if you're not raising money. It forces you to articulate market size, competitive landscape, and unit economics in ways that will sharpen your thinking regardless of whether a check ever follows.

The Customer Deck (10–12 slides)

This one is about their problem, not your product. Lead with the world they live in. Name the pain. Show that you understand their situation better than they expect you to. Then introduce your product as the logical response to everything you just described. The mistake most teams make is leading with the product. Lead with the customer's reality instead. Your product shows up as the resolution, not the pitch.

The Partner Deck (10–12 slides)

If you have distribution partners, integration partners, or organizational relationships that matter to your growth, you need a version that speaks their language. What does the partnership mean for them? What do their people gain? What does it cost them? Partners evaluate opportunities differently than investors or users — they're thinking about risk to their reputation and value to their audience. This deck should answer both.

The master deck keeps everything in one place and makes updating straightforward. When something changes — a new metric, a new customer, a new competitive dynamic — you update it once and pull the relevant slides into whichever targeted version needs it.

Convene an Actual Focus Group

Talking to customers informally is valuable. An actual focus group is different, and the difference matters.

An informal conversation tells you what one person thinks. A focus group puts eight to twelve people in the same room, and what happens in that dynamic is something you can't replicate one conversation at a time. People build on each other's responses. Someone says something and three others nod. A hesitation one person voices turns out to be shared by everyone. Those moments are where your most useful pre-launch insight lives.

Most founders skip this step because it feels like extra work when they're already stretched thin. But the ask is simpler than it sounds. You're not recruiting strangers. You're inviting people who already know you and care about the problem you're solving. Your Real 10 is the obvious starting point.

Reach out personally. Tell them you're getting close to launch and you'd value their perspective before you go live. Ask for ninety minutes. Most people who are genuinely interested in what you're building will say yes, especially if they feel like their input will actually shape something.

A focus group of eight to twelve people before launch will tell you more about your message, your market, and your product's place in it than months of post-launch data. Convene one before you go live.

Run Social Ads for Feedback, Not Conversion

Here's something most founders don't realize: you don't need a finished product to run ads. You don't even need a beta. All you need is a message and somewhere to send people — a waitlist, a lead magnet, an early access page. If you're still in your build, this is something you can start today.

Running ads before launch is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with a small budget. You're not trying to acquire users yet. You're buying information. Which version of your message makes someone stop scrolling? Which headline gets a comment? Which problem statement makes someone tag a colleague? Those signals tell you whether your positioning is landing before you've committed your launch to it.

Take three or four variations of your positioning statement and turn each one into a simple ad. Same creative. Different headline and copy. Run them against the same audience for one to two weeks. Watch which version generates the most engagement, the most comments, the most shares. Then adjust. Early signals are cheap. Post-launch corrections are not.

A few practical notes:

• LinkedIn works well if your user is a professional or organizational buyer
• Meta works better for consumer-facing or community-driven products
• A waitlist or lead magnet is all you need as a destination — keep the call to action that simple
• Screenshot every comment. The exact words people use in response to your ads are some of the best copywriting research available to you

By the time you go live, you'll know which version of your message the market actually responds to — and you'll have a list of people who already raised their hand. That's a meaningful head start over teams that launch cold and figure it out afterward.

The Through-Line

These six steps aren't a checklist to complete and file away. They're a conversation with the market, and each one informs the next. Your positioning statement sharpens your Real 10. Your Real 10 shapes your manifesto. Your manifesto feeds your decks. Your focus group refines your language. Your ads test it against reality.

The teams that launch well aren't the ones who got everything right the first time. They're the ones who got honest feedback early and made adjustments before the stakes got high.

You built the product. Now go build the business around it.