the short version
- Pick the launch date first, then work backwards. Leave room for App Store review.
- Week 1: the teardown and the plan. Week 2: polish, screenshots, landing page. Week 3: the launch film and the UGC shoot. Week 4: line it up and launch.
- Pick two or three channels and do them properly, rather than seven badly.
- Only two weeks? Keep the screenshots, a one-page site, five UGC videos and a tight launch day. Shrink the film. Skip deep polish.
In this post8 sections
Four weeks is the sweet spot for launching a consumer app. It’s long enough to make things you’re proud of and short enough that nobody loses the plot. Give a launch two months and it turns into a “project” with a Notion page nobody opens. Give it a week and you ship a screen recording with a stock track under it.
This is the plan we run for an Ignite launch, written out so you can run it yourself. Steal all of it.
Before week one: pick the date
Everything works backwards from launch day, so pick it first and say it out loud to someone who’ll hold you to it.
- Pick a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Mondays are for inboxes, and Fridays are for leaving early. Check it doesn’t clash with a bank holiday, a big Apple event or a competitor’s launch you already know about.
- Leave room for review. App Store review is often quick, but “often” isn’t a plan. Submit your release build at least a week before launch day and set it to manually release this version, so it’s approved and waiting rather than going live at 3am on its own.
- Check Google’s rules if you’re on Android. Newer personal Google Play developer accounts have to run a closed test before they can publish to production (at the time of writing: 12 testers for 14 days). That alone is longer than two weeks, so start it now.
Week 1: the teardown and the plan
The goal of week one is to know exactly what you’re launching, who it’s for, and what you’ll say. No pixels yet.
Use your app like a stranger. Delete it, reinstall it, sign up with a new email and go through onboarding without skipping anything. Write down every moment you hesitate. This is the same thing we do in a free teardown, and it’s always humbling.
Write the one sentence. What it is and who it’s for, in words your mum would understand. “X for Y” is fine. If the team can’t agree on the sentence, the screenshots, the film and the creators definitely won’t.
Find the hero moment. Every good consumer app has one screen where people go “oh, nice”. The card flipping over, the map filling in, the photo turning into something. That moment is the star of your screenshots, your film and your UGC. If it’s buried three screens deep, moving it forward is your most important design job.
Pick your channels. Two or three, done properly. For most consumer apps that’s TikTok (or Reels), X and Product Hunt. Each one needs real work, so a channel you can’t feed is better dropped now than abandoned on the day.
Book people now. Creators, a motion designer, whoever’s helping with the film: they need lead time. Week three is too late to start asking.
By Friday you should have:
Week 2: polish, screenshots and the landing page
Week two is about making the app look as good as it is.
Polish the first minute. You don’t need to redesign the app. You need to fix onboarding and the three to five screens people see first. Cut every step you can, ask for permissions only when they make sense, and get people to the hero moment fast. If you can only fix one thing, fix the empty states: an app with nothing in it looks broken.
Make the App Store screenshots. These are a poster, not a manual. One idea per frame, captions you can read at thumbnail size, real UI with real content. We wrote up the ten things we check in every teardown.
Build the landing page. One page. The sentence as the headline, the hero moment right under it (a short looping video beats a static mockup), the store badges, and a way to stay in touch if they’re not ready to download. Only use social proof you actually have. “Join 10,000 users” on day zero fools nobody.
Write the store copy. App name, subtitle, keywords, promotional text and the first few lines of the description. The subtitle is prime real estate: use it for what the app does, not a slogan.
Week 3: the launch film and the UGC shoot
Week three is content week. It’s the busiest, so the decisions from week one are what keep it sane.
The launch film. 30–60 seconds, built to work with the sound off, because feeds autoplay video muted and plenty of people never tap for sound. Script on Monday (words only, one page), music and a beat sheet on Tuesday, a rough animatic by Wednesday, then build, sound and export. Our post on how to structure a 45-second launch film has the beats.
The UGC shoot. Brief your creators with one page, not twelve. Shoot more hooks than you think you need: the first two seconds decide whether anyone watches, so one good body with three different openings is worth more than three unrelated videos. Here’s how we brief creators.
Export everything twice. 16:9 for X and the site, 9:16 for TikTok and Reels, a 30-second cut for an App Store preview if you want one, and a poster frame for every video.
By Friday:
Week 4: line it up, then launch
Monday: Check the build is approved and waiting, with the final screenshots, preview and copy attached. On the App Store those go through review with the version, which is one more reason to submit early. (Promotional text is the exception: you can change it any time.) Get the landing page ready to flip to “we’re live”.
Tuesday: Draft and schedule the Product Hunt page: tagline, gallery with the film first, and your maker comment. Draft every post for launch day, word for word. Yes, every one.
Wednesday: Write the list of people you’ll message personally on the day. Not a mass DM: a short, specific message to each person, saying why you thought of them. Do a full run-through of the run sheet with everyone who has a job.
Thursday: launch day. Release the app first thing, check the store link works from a phone that isn’t yours, then follow the run sheet. Reply to everyone, all day.
Friday: Thank people. Post a recap. Repost the UGC that did best, re-cut with a different hook. Write down what you’d change while you still remember.
After launch: keep it burning
Launch day is a spike, not a strategy. The week after matters just as much: people who saw you once need to see you again before they download. Keep posting the UGC on a schedule, reply to every App Store review, and fix the thing everyone mentioned in the comments. This is the bit our monthly plan, Burn, exists for, but you can absolutely run it yourself with a calendar and a bit of discipline.
Only got two weeks?
It happens. Investors move a date, a competitor ships, a press slot appears. Here’s what to keep, shrink and cut:
| Call | What | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Keep | App Store screenshots | They’re on the page whether you like it or not |
| Keep | A one-page landing page | Somewhere to send people that isn’t a TestFlight link |
| Keep | Five UGC videos with different hooks | Enough to learn what works, small enough to shoot in two days |
| Keep | A written launch-day run sheet | The cheapest thing on this list and the one people skip |
| Shrink | The film | A tight 15–20 second cut: the hero moment, big type, one line, your name |
| Shrink | Channels | Pick one main channel and one backup |
| Cut | Deep app polish | Fix onboarding bugs and empty states only |
| Cut | Product Hunt, unless you already have a community there | It’s a lot of work to do half-heartedly |
The two-week version, roughly: days 1–2 for the plan and the sentence, days 3–6 for screenshots and the landing page, days 5–9 for the UGC shoot and the short film, days 10–13 to line everything up, and day 14 to launch. It’s tight, but it’s a real launch.
The whole plan, on one page
If you’d rather hand the whole four weeks to one crew, that’s literally what Ignite is. Or start with a free teardown and we’ll tell you which of these weeks you can skip.
