How do you launch the app you built with AI, and find its first users?

You have an app that works on its own domain, takes payments and records where visitors come from. This chapter is the order to tell people about it in. It is short on purpose: each step links to a page that goes deeper, and the launch checklist holds every task in one printable list.

One thing to settle before you start: a launch is not one post on one day. It is a small sequence, and the first people you tell matter more than the biggest place you post.

Step 1: Tell your waitlist first

If you followed chapter 1, you have a list of people who asked to be told when the app is ready. They already said they want it, and hearing about the launch from a public post first is an easy way to lose them.

Send them one plain email before you post anywhere else:

• One line on what the app does for them, in the words you used on the waitlist page.
• The link, tagged so you can tell these visits apart (more on tags below).
• One sentence asking them to reply with what confused them or what they expected to find.

That reply line is the reason to go to them first. The people on your list will hit the rough edges a day before the public does, and their answers tell you what to fix before the bigger audience arrives. If you would rather let them in a few at a time, soft launch or hard launch explains how to do both with the same list.

What to write, and when, is covered in tell your waitlist you launched and how often to email your waitlist.

With Nordva Launch: first set where replies go (Settings, “Replies to your emails”, your own address), so the answers reach you. On the Indie plan ($19 a month), the waitlist announcement email goes to everyone who didn’t unsubscribe, with an unsubscribe link, and its launch report counts who paid within 30 days of their own email, leaving out people who had already paid. You can send the same email from any mail tool; you just lose the report.

Step 2: Pick two or three places where your people are

Not ten. Two or three places you can actually be present in on the day. The right places are the ones where your future users already ask for help with the problem your app solves, not the ones with the most traffic.

Good ways to find them:

• Search for the problem in your own words on Reddit, in forums and in Discord or Slack groups for your niche. Where people describe the problem, they will read about a fix.
• Look at where the people on your waitlist came from. If you measured it in chapter 7, your analytics already names the first places to go back to.
• Ask the first few people who replied to your email where they hang out online.

Maker sites are one option among these, not the default. Hacker News has its own format for things you made: the title starts with “Show HN”, it has to be something people can try, and sign-up pages and landing pages are off topic. Its guidelines also say it must be something you are around to discuss, and that you should not ask friends to upvote or comment (Show HN guidelines). The details are in how to post a Show HN. Whether Product Hunt fits your audience is its own question: should you launch on Product Hunt.

Read each place’s rules before you post. Many communities limit self-promotion, and a removed post teaches you nothing. How to promote an app you built with AI covers how to write a post that leads with what the app does rather than with the fact that AI built it.

Step 3: Give every place its own tagged link

Chat apps, email clients and many mobile apps often send no referrer, so a click from them lands in your analytics as “direct” and you can’t tell which post it came from. A UTM tag on the link keeps the source. Google’s own guide says to always set utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign together (Google Analytics Help).

An example, with made-up values you would change for each place:

https://yourapp.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch
https://yourapp.com/?utm_source=waitlist&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=launch
https://yourapp.com/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch

Keep utm_campaign the same for the whole launch and change utm_source per place. Write the links into a small table before the day, so you are not typing them under pressure. Then open each one yourself and check your analytics shows the visit with the right source. If a tag vanishes on the way in, UTM parameters disappear after a redirect explains the usual cause.

This is the step that makes chapter 9 possible. Without it, a total number of signups is all you will ever know; with it, you know which place brought the people who stayed and paid.

Step 4: What to have ready (the checklist)

Everything to test and prepare the week before is in the launch checklist, in order. For an app built with AI, three items on it matter more than usual, because they are the ones that behave differently on the real domain than in the builder’s preview:

• Sign up and use the app on the live site, on a phone, as a stranger would.
• Make one real payment and refund yourself, so you know live mode works (the payments chapter set it up).
• Check that no secret key is in browser code or in your repository.

Also write each post in its place’s own voice ahead of time, with a screenshot or a short video. Pasting the same text everywhere reads like an advert everywhere.

Step 5: Be there on the day

Most of the work on launch day is being present:

1. Send the waitlist email first, then post in each place at the time you picked, spreading the posts so you can keep up with replies.
2. Stay in every thread and answer every question. The questions show you what your page failed to explain; copy them into a note.
3. Watch signups and errors as they arrive. A broken signup form loses exactly the people who were most curious, so fix it before anything else.
4. Write down every change you make during the day, with the time. Tomorrow you will want to know whether signups rose because of a post or because of a fix.

Don’t judge the day by its traffic or its upvotes. Those show attention, not whether you found users. How to know if your launch worked explains what to look at instead, and after how long.

If nobody comes

A quiet launch is common, and it is one sample, not a verdict. It usually means the posts went to places where your users don’t read, or the page didn’t say clearly who the app is for. Your tagged links will show which of the two it was. Built it, nobody came walks through what to check.

Who should not use Nordva Launch for this

If you have no waitlist and already use an email tool and analytics you trust, you don’t need Launch for this step: send the email from your tool and keep the tagged links. Launch helps most when you want the email, the sources and the payments that followed in one place.

The next chapter is the month after: what to do once your app is live.