The Solo Dev's Launch Day Checklist (After Shipping 3 Mac Apps)

I've shipped three Mac apps in the past year: a token counter, a feed blocker, and a nutrition tracker. Every launch taught me something the previous one didn't. Here's the checklist I've refined across all three. It's not theoretical — it's what I actually do the morning I hit "publish." 48 Hours Before Launch Kill your feature list. Whatever you're still working on, stop. If it's not done 48 hours before launch, it's a post-launch update. I've delayed launches by weeks chasing "one more thing." Never again. Write your landing page copy first. Not after the app is done. Before. If you can't explain what your app does in two sentences, you don't understand your own product yet. For TokenBar , it took me three rewrites to land on "see your LLM token spend in your menu bar." Short. Clear. Done. Test on a clean machine. Your dev machine has a thousand things installed. Borrow a friend's laptop or spin up a fresh user account. Half of my launch-day bugs came from assumptions about my own e