Is your launch actually ready?

Can you name the category you compete in using words your buyers already use?

Yes means a term buyers would say unprompted, not a phrase you invented for the pitch deck.

Have five or more people outside your company repeated your value proposition back to you correctly?

Yes means you showed them the homepage, asked them to explain it, and they got it right without help.

Do you know the specific alternative your buyers use today, including a spreadsheet and doing nothing?

Yes means a real list drawn from conversations, not a competitor grid assembled from search results.

Does your homepage headline say what the product is, rather than how it feels?

Yes means someone who knows nothing about you can tell what it does from the headline alone.

Have you written down who this product is explicitly not for?

Yes means a documented anti-profile that your marketing and your sales conversations actually respect.

Have you spoken with fifteen or more people in your target market in the last ninety days?

Conversations about their problem count. Product demos do not.

Do you have a waitlist, pilot group or pre-commitment list carrying real intent signals?

Yes means people did something that cost them: paid, gave a work email with context, or committed calendar time.

Is there measurable demand for the problem, independent of your product name?

Search volume, active community threads, job postings or competitor traffic that would exist whether or not you launched.

Has anyone paid you, or formally committed to pay, before launch?

Design partners, paid pilots, letters of intent, pre-orders. Free users do not count.

Can you describe the trigger event that makes someone start looking for this?

Yes means a specific moment: hired a fifth employee, failed an audit, lost a large customer, got a new compliance deadline.

Does the first screen answer what it is, who it is for, and what to do next?

Judged on a 375 pixel wide viewport, not on your desktop monitor.

Is there exactly one primary call to action per page?

Yes means competing actions such as book a demo, start free, read the docs and join Slack have been reduced to a single visual priority.

Is your proof specific rather than decorative?

Named customers, real numbers, attributed quotes or third-party ratings. Not a row of grey logos and the phrase trusted by thousands.

Does your form ask only for what you genuinely need at this stage?

Yes means you can justify each field commercially, today.

Have you walked the entire path on a mid-range Android phone on a real mobile connection?

A resized desktop browser is not a test. An actual device on actual mobile data is.

When you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini your main category question, is your product named?

Ask what the best tools are for your category, in three engines, in a fresh session. Yes means you appear in at least one.

Do third-party sources mention your product by name?

Reviews, round-ups, community threads, directories, newsletters. Links are not required. The mention itself is the signal.

Do you have a comparison or alternatives page naming the tools buyers weigh you against?

Yes means a real page comparing you with named alternatives, honest weaknesses included.

Is your pricing public?

Contact us on every tier counts as no.

Do you have willingness to pay evidence beyond an internal guess?

Survey data, pilot pricing that held, competitor benchmarking, or a price somebody actually paid.

Does your value metric grow as the customer succeeds?

Yes means you charge on something that rises when they get more value: seats, usage, revenue processed, outcomes delivered.

Is there a defensible reason for your highest tier to exist?

Yes means it solves a real problem for a real segment, rather than existing purely to anchor the tier below it.

Have you written down what happens when the trial or free tier ends?

Yes means a defined conversion moment with defined messaging and a defined fallback.

Is time to first value under ten minutes for a brand new user?

Measured from signup to the moment they experience the thing they came for.

Is your activation event defined and instrumented?

Yes means one named action that predicts retention, visible in your analytics today.

Does an empty account teach the user anything?

Sample data, a guided first action, or a template. A blank screen with a plus button counts as no.

Can somebody who signs up at two in the morning with nobody available still succeed?

Yes means self-serve documentation, in-product guidance, or a path obvious enough not to need either.

Is the product stable enough that a traffic spike will not break it?

Yes means you have load tested, or you know your ceiling and have a plan for reaching it.

Does your largest contentful paint land under 2.5 seconds on mobile?

Measured with field or lab data on a throttled mobile connection, not on your office wifi.

Do you have a channel plan with a named owner and a date against each channel?

Yes means a real grid: who posts what, where, and when.

Is your day zero asset list complete and reviewed?

Launch post, demo video, screenshots at correct dimensions, community and press copy, email to your list, FAQ, support macros.

Are analytics and attribution live and verified before launch rather than after?

Yes means you pushed test traffic through every entry path and watched the events arrive.

Have you written down what success looks like, in numbers, before launching?

Yes means a target you would be willing to be judged against afterwards.

Is there a scheduled thirty day review, with the people who can act on it?

Yes means it is already in the calendar with the actual attendees invited.