A practical checklist for launching a SaaS platform

Most launch checklists are really feature checklists: is the core flow done, is billing wired up, does the demo look good. Those matter, but they’re not what usually goes wrong on launch day. The things that go wrong are almost always operational — the parts nobody demoed.

Before you announce a date

Backups exist and have been restored at least once. A backup you’ve never restored isn’t a backup, it’s a hope. Test the restore process before you need it, not during an incident.

Someone owns monitoring and alerting. Not “we’ll check the dashboard” — an actual alert, to an actual person, for the handful of failure modes that would hurt the most (payment failures, auth outages, database connection exhaustion).

You know your actual capacity limits. Not benchmarks from a quiet staging environment — a rough, honest number for how much concurrent load the production environment can take before it degrades. If you don’t know the number, you don’t know how close launch traffic will get you to it.

DNS, TLS and email deliverability are confirmed, not assumed. SPF/DKIM records, certificate renewal, and a real test send to a Gmail and an Outlook address — not just “it worked once in dev.”

There’s a rollback plan that’s actually been rehearsed. If the deploy goes wrong, does the team know the exact steps to get back to the last good state, or is that being figured out live under pressure?

On launch day

Keep the surface area small. Freeze non-critical changes for 24–48 hours either side of launch — this is not the day to also ship an unrelated refactor. Have one person clearly responsible for watching production, with nothing else on their plate.

After launch

The checklist doesn’t end when the traffic arrives. The first week after launch is when most of the real signal shows up — actual usage patterns, actual load, actual edge cases. Plan to be more available in that window, not less, and resist the temptation to immediately move on to the next feature before you’ve confirmed the platform is stable under real conditions.

None of this is complicated. It’s just easy to skip when the pressure is on the feature work — which is exactly why it’s worth writing down in advance.