The AI Startup Launch Checklist: 87 Places to Announce Your Product

Launch day only happens once per product. Most founders spend it obsessing over one channel — usually Product Hunt — and miss that a real launch is a coordinated push across 60-90 surfaces on the same week. This checklist groups 87 of them into seven categories, in the order they should fire, so momentum on one channel feeds the next instead of fizzling out.

Why 87 places, not 3

A launch that only hits Product Hunt is a single point of failure — if the algorithm doesn't favor you that day, or a bigger launch happens to land the same morning, the whole push produces nothing. Spreading across dozens of directories, communities, and press channels means no single miss sinks the week, and the aggregate signal (backlinks, mentions, upvotes, signups) compounds in a way one channel alone can't. Our full launch checklist directory list covers the directory subset of this in more depth — this article is the full-stack version including press, communities, and newsletters.

Phase 1 — T-minus 14 days: seed and prep (12 places)

Everything in this phase happens before launch day, quietly, so it's ready to fire the moment you go live.

• Reserve your Product Hunt "coming soon" page and start collecting followers.
• Draft and schedule your Product Hunt hunter (ask a well-followed hunter if you don't have standing yourself).
• Set up a BetaList submission (DR 75) — their queue runs 1-2 weeks out, so submit early.
• Prep your Hacker News "Show HN" post — title format matters more than most founders think; lead with what it does, not why it's revolutionary.
• Write your Indie Hackers launch post and milestone update.
• Draft a press kit: logo, screenshots, founder photo, one-paragraph and three-paragraph descriptions, and a boilerplate "About" blurb journalists can paste directly.
• Build your submission kit (see our full directory submission playbook) so directory listings can go out same-day without rewriting copy.
• Line up 3-5 friendly accounts to comment/upvote in the first hour — early velocity matters disproportionately on algorithmic launch platforms.
• Prepare a Twitter/X launch thread (5-8 tweets) and a LinkedIn post.
• Schedule a launch email to your waitlist, timed to go out 30 minutes after you go live elsewhere.
• Set up analytics UTM tags per channel so you can measure which of the 87 actually drove signups.
• Draft your submission to relevant subreddits (see Phase 4) — most require account karma and age minimums, so check requirements a week ahead.

Phase 2 — Launch day core (8 places)

Fire these within the first 2-3 hours of launch day, in this order, so each one's momentum can feed the next:

1. Product Hunt (DR 91) — go live at 12:01am PT for maximum time in the daily ranking window.
2. Hacker News "Show HN" — post 1-2 hours after Product Hunt so you have early upvotes to reference if anyone asks "is this real."
3. Twitter/X launch thread — tag anyone who gave early feedback or beta access.
4. LinkedIn post — B2B AI tools especially should not skip this; LinkedIn's AI-tool audience is underrated.
5. Waitlist launch email.
6. Indie Hackers (DR 81) milestone post.
7. Slack/Discord communities you're already a genuine member of — never cold-drop links in communities you haven't participated in.
8. Personal network — a direct message to 10-20 people who'd genuinely find it useful outperforms a broadcast every time.

Phase 3 — Same-week AI directory batch (25 places)

Directories don't have a "launch day" concept — submit any time in the first week. Prioritize the highest-DR, closest-category-fit directories: There's An AI For That (DR 77), Futurepedia (DR 72), Toolify (DR 73), SaaSHub (DR 79), AlternativeTo (DR 79), and Slant (DR 70), plus every free directory relevant to your category from the free directory list. Aim for 20-25 submissions in week one; the rest of the 1,150+ database can spread across the following weeks per the playbook above.

Phase 4 — Community and forum drops (18 places)

Communities convert best when the founder participates as a person, not a marketer. Relevant subreddits (r/artificial, r/SideProject, r/SaaS, r/OpenAI, and category-specific subs), Discord servers for AI builders, Slack communities in your niche, Reddit's r/InternetIsBeautiful for consumer tools, Hacker News comment threads on adjacent launches (genuinely useful replies, not link drops), Dev.to and Hashnode posts if there's a technical build story worth telling, and niche Facebook groups for your specific vertical (marketing AI, legal AI, etc.) round out this tier. Expect lower volume, higher-intent traffic from this category than from directories.

Phase 5 — Newsletter and press outreach (14 places)

Newsletters have longer lead times — pitch 1-2 weeks before launch, not on launch day. Target AI-focused newsletters with real open rates over ones with big subscriber counts and low engagement. Pitch TechCrunch, VentureBeat, and The Verge only if you have a genuinely newsworthy angle (funding, novel technical approach, notable founder) — generic "we launched an AI tool" pitches get ignored by tier-one press and burn the relationship for your next launch. Smaller AI-specific newsletters and Substacks in your category are more realistic wins and often drive better-qualified traffic per subscriber than general tech press.

Phase 6 — Marketplace and integration listings (10 places)

If your tool integrates with other platforms, list it in their marketplaces: Zapier app directory, Slack App Directory, Chrome Web Store (if there's an extension), the relevant marketplace for whatever platform you build on top of (Shopify, Notion, Figma, etc.), and API marketplaces like RapidAPI if you expose an API. These listings have long tails — they keep sending signups for years after launch week ends, unlike most of the other 77 channels here.

Phase 7 — Week-two follow-up (10 places)

Momentum shouldn't stop after day one. In week two: post a "launch results" retrospective on Indie Hackers and your own blog (people love numbers — signups, revenue, lessons learned), submit to the second tier of AI directories, follow up with any press that didn't respond the first time, post a case study or use case thread now that you have real users, submit to weekly/monthly "best new AI tools" roundup newsletters, and re-share your launch thread with new context ("one week later, here's what we learned"). The founders who keep showing up in week two consistently outperform the ones who go quiet after launch day.

The mistake that undoes all 87

None of this works if the product breaks under launch-day traffic, or if there's no way to capture emails from people who aren't ready to sign up yet. Load-test your infrastructure before launch day, and put a simple waitlist or email capture on your landing page for visitors who click through but aren't ready to convert — a decent fraction of your 87-channel traffic will be exactly that.

A note on sequencing versus a single big-bang push

It's tempting to treat launch day as the entire campaign and hit all 87 channels within 24 hours. Resist that. The channels in this checklist are grouped into phases for a reason: Phase 1 exists so that everything downstream has momentum to point at — a Product Hunt page with zero followers and a Hacker News post with zero context both convert worse than ones backed by two weeks of quiet prep. Phase 2's ordering matters too; posting to Hacker News before Product Hunt has any traction removes your ability to say "already trending on Product Hunt" if anyone in the HN comments asks whether this is a real, validated product. Sequencing is the difference between 87 channels reinforcing each other and 87 channels each getting a fraction of the attention they'd get spread across ten days.

The same logic applies to directory submissions specifically. Submitting to all 1,150+ directories in our database during launch week is neither necessary nor advisable — the 20-25 in Phase 3 are the ones that matter for launch-week visibility and immediate backlink value. The remaining 1,100+ directories are a separate, longer-running project that continues well past launch week; treat launch week as the start of that project, not the entirety of it.

What "success" looks like across 87 channels

Don't judge the campaign by any single channel's performance. A realistic outcome looks like: Product Hunt lands somewhere in the top 10-20 products of the day (not necessarily #1), Hacker News either front-pages briefly or gets a handful of substantive comments, two or three directories send a meaningful trickle of signups over the following months, one or two newsletters mention you, and the aggregate backlink profile from the directory batch quietly supports your domain authority for years. Individually, most of these 87 channels will underperform your hopes. Collectively, spread across a well-sequenced two-week window, they consistently outperform betting everything on a single Product Hunt launch.

Build your directory batch from the full 1,150+ directory database, or start with the launch-specific directory shortlist.