It’s never been easier to launch a SaaS product. Which also means it’s never been more competitive. To be successful, you need to have a clear, step-by-step plan outlining all the activities that need to be executed during each phase of your initial launch. 

How do you validate your concept? Where do you find your first customers? How do you avoid scaling too fast? We’ll be answering all of the questions and more in this product launch checklist so you know exactly how to take your SaaS idea from initial concept to IPO.

B2B SaaS product launch overview

There is no such thing as a “standard” product launch. No two launches will happen the same way and founders should be prepared to adapt and be agile. That being said, a successful SaaS product launch strategy typically unfolds in three phases: Pre-Launch, Launch, and Post-Launch. 

• The Pre-Launch phase (3–6 months) focuses on research, preparation, and building an MVP, including key steps like market research, pricing, and crafting a solid go-to-market strategy.
•  The Launch phase (1–2 months) executes the launch plan, with activities such as announcing the product, engaging early adopters, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process. 
• The Post-Launch phase (6–12 months) emphasizes refining the product, expanding marketing efforts, and monitoring KPIs to drive sustained growth.

Now we’ll be taking a look at how to effectively leverage your time and effort during each stage of your SaaS product launch.

Pre-Launch Phase

Step 1: Conduct market research

Every great product begins with a strong understanding of its target market. Market research isn’t just about identifying who your customers are—it’s about uncovering what drives them, what they need, and, most importantly, the pain points they’re desperate to solve.

There’s a Y Combinator lecture that CMO and VP of Analytics at Meta, Alex Schultz, gave that’s a perfect example of this: Alex dominated the niche market of paper airplanes in the early days of SEO by deeply understanding what his audience wanted. And while the market for paper airplanes wasn’t exactly scalable, the insight into customer behavior laid the groundwork for his later success.

You can conduct this same level of market research by asking yourself the same key questions:

• Who is your target market?
• What are the common customer needs in this space?
• What are the biggest pain points your product can solve?

Then, you can use surveys, focus groups, or even competitor analysis to get a clear picture. As Alex pointed out, without a thorough understanding of your market, it’s impossible to design a product that sticks.

Step 2: Define Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

Once you know your market, it’s time to carve out your unique selling proposition—the thing that sets you apart from the competition. Your USP is more than just a tagline; it’s the essence of your value proposition. Why should your customers choose you over anyone else?

To define your USP:

• Map out your personas: Who are your ideal customers? Are they budget-conscious startups, enterprise-level clients, or solopreneurs looking to streamline operations?
• Pinpoint what makes your product unique. Is it ease of use, affordability, or cutting-edge features?

A compelling USP aligns with your personas and solves their most pressing problems. Take Airbnb’s early approach, as Schultz noted, where they focused on helping users book unique accommodations easily. By addressing a specific need, they created a clear value that set them apart from traditional hotels.

Step 3: Build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

With your market research and USP in place, it’s time for product development. But don’t try to launch with every bell and whistle—start with a minimum viable product. An MVP is the simplest, most essential version of your product that solves a real problem for your customers.

As Schultz highlighted, retention is the single most important metric for growth. A well-designed MVP helps you test whether your product can achieve product-market fit. It’s not about being perfect from the start—it’s about building something that resonates enough for your customers to sign up and stick around.

Focus on:

• Solving one or two customer needs exceptionally well.
• Collecting feedback to iterate and refine.
• Using that feedback to prove your product has staying power.

Launching with an MVP allows you to avoid analysis paralysis and focus on what matters most: delivering real value to your audience. Remember Schultz’s mantra: “Move fast, don’t be afraid to break stuff, and execute today.”

Step 4: Validate your concept through beta testing

Before you officially launch, it’s crucial to test the waters with beta testing. This step ensures your product resonates with real users and helps you fine-tune your offering. Think of beta testing as a low-stakes dress rehearsal—one that delivers valuable insights without the pressure of a full launch.

During this phase, you’ll gather feedback from early adopters. These users are invaluable because they’re often more willing to point out flaws and share honest opinions. Focus on areas like:

• Usability: Is your product intuitive and easy to navigate?
• Value: Does it solve the pain points identified in your earlier research?
• Reliability: Are there any bugs or issues that might disrupt the user experience?

Remember Alex Schultz’s emphasis on retention: if users don’t find value and stick around, there’s no point in scaling. Use user feedback to identify areas for improvement, prioritize fixes, and ensure your product delivers the “magic moment” that keeps people coming back. Schultz pointed out that at Facebook, their growth was tied directly to moments like connecting with friends. What’s the equivalent for your product? Beta testing will help you find out.

Step 5: Define your target audience and create user personas

It’s not enough to have a general idea of who might use your product—you need to deeply understand your target audience and build detailed personas to represent them. This step will help you lock in on your ideal customer profile (ICP) and ensure your messaging and features resonate with the right potential customers.

You can start by segmenting your target audience into distinct groups based on their demographics, behaviors, and needs. Then, create your personas.

For each persona, outline:

• Background: Age, occupation, and lifestyle.
• Job-to-be-done: What are they trying to achieve by using your product?
• Challenges: What pain points do they face that your product can address?

For example, Schultz noted that Airbnb’s growth hinged on understanding both travelers and hosts as personas had their own needs.

 Travelers wanted unique, affordable accommodations, while hosts sought extra income. By tailoring their approach to these distinct personas, Airbnb was able to create an experience that satisfied both sides of the marketplace.

When you have clear personas, you can align your marketing, messaging, and product development efforts to meet the needs of your potential customers more effectively.

Step 6: Develop product pricing and launch strategy

With your product taking shape, it’s time to focus on your pricing model and launch strategy. Pricing isn’t just about covering costs—it’s a strategic decision that affects how customers perceive your product and whether they stick around for the long haul.

Start by considering your pricing model. Will you use a tiered structure, freemium, or pay-as-you-go? Each model comes with its own advantages:

• Freemium: Great for attracting a large user base quickly, but requires clear value in the premium offering to convert users.
• Tiered pricing: Appeals to diverse audiences by offering multiple options based on features or usage levels.
• Pay-as-you-go: Ideal for businesses offering usage-based services, as it ties cost directly to customer value.

You may also consider using a dedicated SaaS billing and FinOps platform like Maxio to test and launch multiple pricing models at once. Not only will this give you more ways to capture the full value of your SaaS, but it will enable you to diversify your go-to-market (GTM) strategy and target your ICP both up- and downmarket.

Next, once you’ve locked in your initial pricing model, craft a launch strategy that aligns with your goals. Schultz highlighted how Facebook’s growth relied on defining a “North Star” metric—like monthly active users—that guided all decisions. For your launch, set clear, measurable objectives, such as:

• Gaining a specific number of paying customers in the first three months.
• Achieving a certain retention rate within a defined time frame.

Your launch strategy should also include marketing plans. You can choose to leverage the typical growth channels like SEO, paid ads, and outreach to build buzz and ensure your product reaches the right people. However, as Paul Graham—one of the early founders of Y Combinator stated—you should also focus on doing things that don’t scale.

These “things that don’t scale” include:

• Personally meeting users, understanding their needs, and helping them set up the product
• Offering hands-on customer support
• Doing things manually that could later be automated, such as running operations or fulfilling services manually to test your product

Are these tactics scalable? No.

But while these tactics won’t work long-term, they are crucial in the beginning stages to build momentum and gather insights for your future growth

Step 7: Prepare your website, marketing, and sales materials

Your website is often the first impression potential customers will have of your product, so it’s critical to get it right. 

Start with a clear, compelling landing page that highlights your product’s value proposition and speaks directly to your target audience. Use concise, benefit-driven messaging paired with strong visuals to draw visitors in.

For example, our current Maxio homepage immediately ties the value of our product back to revenue as this is a huge pain point for our ICP:

Maxio’s billing and financial reporting software homepage (Source)

Once you’ve drafted your initial copy and wireframes for your landing page, you should also optimize your landing page and supporting pages with SEO to ensure your product gets discovered by search engines. Conduct keyword research to identify terms your audience is searching for and incorporate them naturally into your website copy, headers, and metadata. 

At Maxio, we did this by intentionally adding “billing and financial reporting software” as an H1 header above our main tagline. The only caveat here is that if you’re in a new or emerging category, there may be little awareness of your product, and as a result, no real search queries for your solution. If this is the case, don’t worry about optimizing for search just yet.

After you’ve built out your landing page, you should prioritize the following pages:

• Products
• Industries served
• Use cases
• Integrations
• Case Studies
• Pricing 
• Documentation (if publicly available)

Design these pages to speak directly to your ICP. Ideally, your website will do most of the selling for your before they sign up for a discovery call or free trial for your site. Once you have these pages published, then you can refocus on building out a traditional content marketing strategy.

Step 8: Set key performance indicators (KPIs) and milestones

Once your product is ready to launch, you’ll need to track progress and measure success. This is where setting measurable KPIs and milestones becomes tablestakes—they provide a roadmap for your growth and ensure you’re focused on metrics that truly matter.

You can start by identifying the KPIs most relevant to your business model. These will vary depending on your product, vertical, and company stage, but the most common examples include:

• User acquisition metrics: Signups, cost per acquisition (CPA), and conversion rates.
• Engagement metrics: Daily or monthly active users (DAUs/MAUs), session duration, and feature adoption rates.
• Revenue metrics: Average revenue per user (ARPU), customer lifetime value (CLV), and churn rate.

Once your KPIs are set, break them down into actionable milestones. These should be realistic, time-bound goals that guide your efforts and keep your team aligned. 

For example:

• Reach 1,000 paying customers within three months of launch.
• Achieve a 70% customer retention rate by the end of the first quarter.
• Secure 10 high-quality backlinks to improve organic search rankings in the first month.

Tracking your metrics on a consistent basis will make it easier to spot trends early and adjust your strategy as needed. For instance, if your conversion rate is lower than expected, it might signal a need to tweak your landing page or simplify your signup process. Similarly, if your engagement metrics fall short, it could indicate a need for better onboarding or feature improvements.

How you measure these metrics is ultimately up to you, but at Maxio we do this by building custom dashboards in our metrics and reporting tools. Instead of building reports manually, the whole process is automated, and enables us to:

• Access and analyze customer subscription and billing information to make truly data-backed decisions
• Run calculations with always up-to-date billing and invoicing records
• Segment financial data by associated customers and invoices
• Generate trustworthy financial reports with just a few clicks

You can check out our custom reports here and find the ones that best meet your needs.

Launch Phase

Step 9: Execute your go-to-market strategy

With your product ready to enter the market, the next step is to execute a well-crafted go-to-market plan. Your marketing strategy during this phase should focus on generating buzz, attracting leads, and converting prospects into paying customers.

But your go-to-market motion is going to look very different depending on how your product experience is built. If you’re focused on product-led growth vs. sales-led growth you might want to consider leveraging viral growth loops instead of running targeted account-based marketing campaigns for enterprise.

Understanding these two GTM strategies is another post entirely, which is why we wrote a dedicated ebook on How Product-Led Growth is Reshaping B2B SaaS—if you have more questions on which GTM strategy is right for you, you’ll find it in this guide.

That being said, there are plenty of GTM tactics that you can use regardless of whether your product-led, sales-led, or both.

For instance, you can start by leveraging social media to maximize visibility. Platforms like LinkedIn and Reddit are both great choices for reaching your target audience. Share engaging content tailored to each platform, such as teaser videos, posts asking for product feedback, or countdowns to your launch date. You may also consider running targeted ads to amplify your reach and drive traffic to your landing page.

Additionally, your go-to-market strategy should also include outreach to industry-specific influencers, bloggers, and media outlets who can help spread the word. Offer them an exclusive look at your product or invite them to a pre-launch demo. Collaborating with trusted voices in your niche can add credibility to your brand and make it easier to penetrate the market.

Step 10: Announce your product launch

Your launch day is your moment to shine. To ensure maximum impact, build a strong outreach plan well in advance. Start by creating a launch announcement that is compelling, concise, and shareable. From here, be sure to tap on any investors or stakeholders that can amplify your message and spread the word about your launch. 

This should be a coordinated effort that leverages multiple channels, including

• Traditional PR
• Social media
• Your company blog or site
• Relevant online communities and threads
• Live webinars
• Podcasts
• In-person events

Keep in mind that these all don’t need to be siloed activities. Instead, build a core message around your launch and distribute them accordingly across all of the channels listed above. Not only is this more efficient, but it will allow you to reach your ICP in more than one place.

Step 11: Engage with your early adopters

There’s a great book written by Geoffrey Moore called Crossing the Chasm that dives deep on the adoption gap that lies between early and mainstream markets.

His best advice?

Your early adopters are often your most valuable advocates. They’re the users who are willing to take a chance on your product, provide feedback, and spread the word, and engaging with them effectively can help you generate momentum for your product and establish a loyal user base.

In terms of engagement, one of the best platforms you can use to attract early adopters is Product Hunt. Launching on Product Hunt can connect you with an audience that’s already eager to discover and share innovative products. From here, you might consider offering a limited-time discount or freemium version of your product to encourage signups. This will give your potential users the option to experience the core features of your product without committing to payment upfront. 

Then, once you’ve engaged your early adopters, prioritize building relationships with them. There are plenty of ways to go about this but a few options include:

• Creating an early-adopters panel with regular meetings via Zoom
• Subscribing new users to a newsletter with relevant product updates
• Building a dedicated community within Slack, Discord, or similar community platform

Step 12: Provide User Onboarding

Shortening your initial time-to-value for new users in crucial when you’re launching a new SaaS product 

That’s why you need to optimize your onboarding process to ensure your new users understand your product and feel confident using it. Not only does this set the tone for your customer’s journey but also significantly impacts long-term engagement and satisfaction.

You can begin by creating a guided product demo that highlights your product’s key features and demonstrates its value. This could be in the form of a pre-recorded walkthrough or an interactive guide integrated into your platform. Make sure to focus on solving the user’s pain points and showing how your product addresses their specific needs. 

For example, at Maxio, we host live product demos that give users the chance to learn more about our product before or after they become a customer.

Additionally, you should supplement your onboarding process with clear, accessible tutorials. These can be in the form of videos, FAQs, or step-by-step documentation. And finally, personalize the onboarding experience where possible. Tailored messaging, such as welcome emails or pop-up tips, drives the point home that your product is created to solve your users’ specific pain points and is worth the investment.

Step 13: Monitor your product’s technical performance

As your product gains traction, keeping an eye on its functionality is essential.

This means monitoring your platform for bugs or performance issues. Pay special attention to load times, scalability, and responsiveness, especially during high-traffic periods following your launch as you begin to scale. Continuously testing and addressing functionality concerns is key to maintaining a polished product experience.

You may also consider studying specific user analytics to identify product areas that need optimization. For example, if you notice a drop-off in usage at specific points in your workflow, investigate and make improvements. Regularly collecting and analyzing data helps you address pain points and refine your platform to better meet customer needs.

Step 14: Make customer support a priority

Chances are, when you’re first launching, your initial users will find a way to break your product. It’s bound to happen. And when it does, you’ll need to have a customer support team or workflow at the ready to avoid any unnecessary downtime.

In terms of how you support your customers, you can use tools like live chat, email support, and knowledge bases to help your customers get the assistance they need quickly. A fast response time and proactive approach to solving problems go a long way in making customers feel valued.

Additionally, you can create an accessible self-help library that includes FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and best practices. Many users prefer to resolve issues independently, so providing comprehensive resources can reduce the strain on your support team while empowering users.

However, if your customers need real-time support, you should direct them to an AI agent or human customer support representative to resolve the issue. Then, take note of the issue they helped resolve and create a resource your customers can use to self-service this issue.

Post-Launch Phase

Step 15: Collect and analyze user feedback

Once your product is live, the insights you gain from your initial customer feedback will become your most valuable resource. Actively listening to users helps you identify pain points, understand what’s working, and uncover new opportunities to enhance the user experience.

You can take this a step further and establish a strong feedback loop by providing your users with multiple ways to share their thoughts. This can include surveys, in-app feedback forms, or even direct communication through your customer support channels. 

Step 16: Iterate and improve

With your customer feedback in hand, it’s time to refine your product. Continuous iteration is essential for maintaining relevance and value, especially in a competitive SaaS business environment.

Map out a product roadmap that incorporates these user suggestions and aligns with your long-term goals. Then, focus on delivering updates and new product features that address critical user needs while improving overall functionality.

Of course, this sounds easy on paper. Competing priorities are bound to pop up—especially after you’ve just launched your product. However, if you’re serious about improving the customer experience, be sure that your engineering and product teams are aligned on what features, modules, or integrations or high-priority on your product roadmap. Otherwise, you risk building a SaaS platform that isn’t actually benefiting your end-users.

Step 17: Expand your marketing plan and efforts

As your user base grows, so should your promotional efforts. Scaling your marketing campaigns will help your product reach new audiences and continue to attract interest—even in a saturated market.

As a general word of advice, pick one or two marketing channels and double down. Especially in the early days of your product launch, it can be tempting to chase every growth hack and channel available to you, but this can dilute your message and spread your marketing team too thin. Instead, run small growth sprints to find which channel works best (Organic, email, paid, podcast, ABM, events) and continue to leverage those channels.

Eventually, you’ll be able to diversify your efforts, but you should be very intentional about how you invest your marketing dollars early on.

Step 18: Monitor metrics and KPIs

Tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs) is essential for understanding the effectiveness of your efforts so far and staying aligned with your goals. Metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), churn rate, and lifetime value (LTV) provide valuable insights into your product’s performance.

And now that you’re post-launch, you should take full advantage of tools like dashboards or CRM software to consolidate and analyze this data from various sources. For example, within Maxio, we use our metrics and reporting tools to measure these core KPIs—ARR, NRR, CAC, churn—across individual customer segments to see where our efforts may be falling short.

By monitoring your KPIs regularly with tools like Maxio, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your product and marketing strategy too.

Step 19: Pursue further growth

After stabilizing your product and scaling your marketing efforts, your focus should sift towards sustained growth. This means building a dedicated GTM team to strategize and execute marketing campaigns and coordinated sales efforts that attract a steady stream of new users.

Platforms like LinkedIn are powerful tools for expanding your reach, especially in B2B markets. You can use targeted ads, thought leadership posts, and outreach campaigns to connect with key decision-makers and build relationships within your industry.

Similarly, there are several platforms you can use to identify potential buyers in your ICP such as Clay, Keplay, and Crunchbase that all skew towards helping SaaS companies with their demand generation efforts. 

But most importantly, remember that growth is an ongoing process. By consistently innovating, refining your strategies, and staying attuned to your users’ needs, your startup can continue to scale and remain competitive.

Maxio is the best tool for successful SaaS product launches

You don’t have to be an expert in growth, product, marketing, or sales to have a successful product launch. What you do need to have is an obsession with your customer and a willingness to learn and grow in these areas.

And with dedicated SaaS billing and financial operations tools like Maxio, you can enable self-sign-up, automate payments, and customize pricing to fit your business model—whether it’s usage-based, tiered, or freemium. Maxio helps you get paid faster while giving you real-time insights into customer behavior, so you can focus on growing your SaaS instead of wrestling with spreadsheets.

Want to make sure you’re equipped with the best tools to launch your SaaS product? Schedule a demo to learn how Maxio can help.