Start with the tagline
On the board, your is almost all a visitor reads before deciding whether to click. It has one job: say what the product does for someone, in plain words. A clever line that needs the rest of the page to make sense won't get the click that would explain it.
The future of productivity, reimagined.
Meeting notes that turn themselves into action items.
A good test is whether a stranger could guess what they'd get after clicking. Read your tagline next to two or three others from the same week's board. If yours could describe any of them, rewrite it until it could only describe yours. Keep the product's name out of it, too: it's already right above.
Screenshots over slogans
Treat your first screenshot as the one people will judge the product by, because many visitors look at it before reading a word of the description. Show the product doing its main job, not a marketing image with a headline on it. If there's a moment where the product delivers, the export, the result, the thing it makes, put that first.
- Use real screens with realistic data, not empty states or lorem ipsum.
- Crop to what matters. A full-screen capture with tiny text shows less than half the screen at a readable size.
- Add a caption to each shot saying what it shows. The caption is what makes a screenshot readable without context.
- Three to five shots is plenty. Order them like a short demo: the main job, then how you get there, then the details.
If the product is hard to show in a still, a short series can work better than one busy screen: before, during and after. What matters is that someone flicking through the shots understands what the product does without the description.
A description people finish
Write the description for someone who's interested but busy. Open with the problem in one sentence, then what the product does about it, then who it's best for. Leave the feature list to the features section, where it's easier to scan, and keep pricing to the pricing field rather than repeating it in the text.
If you'd rather not start from a blank page, drafts the listing from your website.1 Treat what it gives you as a first draft: it usually gets the facts right, but you know which ones matter most to the people you're trying to reach, and which ones are only interesting to you.
Features, audience and FAQ
The structured sections below the description do a lot of quiet work. Features should each be a short title and a sentence on what it lets someone do, not what it is. The audience field says who the product is for, which helps the right visitors recognise themselves. A few honest FAQ answers, about pricing, data, or what happens when someone leaves, remove the doubts that stop people trying a new product.
Say who made it
People back people. Add everyone who built the product as a maker, and write a short maker's story: why you built it, what was hard, and what's next. It's the part of the page only you can write, and it's often what turns a visitor who's curious into one who wants you to succeed.
Verify your domain while you're at it. The next to your product's name shows that one of its makers controls its website, which matters to anyone deciding whether to trust a product they've never heard of.2 Verifying also unlocks the option to show your revenue, if you want to.
Be there on the day
A launch page with a conversation under it gives visitors a reason to stay. Post a first comment saying hello and asking a specific question, something you'd genuinely like to know, then answer everyone who replies during the week. It shows there are people behind the product, and the questions strangers ask are some of the most useful feedback you'll hear.
Reply like a person, not a press release. Thank people briefly, answer what they actually asked, and admit it when something isn't there yet. A visitor reading the thread later will trust a maker who says 'not yet, but it's next' more than one who answers every question with a link.
A short checklist
Before your launch goes live, run through this list. Everything on it can be done from your launch's page in your submissions, and none of it takes long.
- A tagline that says what the product does, without its name.
- A first screenshot that shows the main job, with a caption.
- A description that opens with the problem and says who it's for.
- Features written as what they let someone do.
- Every maker added, and a short maker's story.
- A verified domain.
- A first comment ready, and time set aside to reply during the week.
On the day it goes live, open your launch page on your phone as well as your computer. Check that the first screenshot is readable at that size, that the tagline isn't cut short on the board, and that the link goes where you expect. Small problems are easier to spot on the real page than in the editor, and you can still fix them.
Once that's done, the rest is the week itself. How a launch week works covers what happens from Monday's opening to Sunday's close, and what tends to help along the way.