You've built the product. Features work. Stripe is connected. You're ready to launch — right? Probably not. Most MVPs that "launch" and fail aren't killed by bad ideas. They're killed by the 15 things the founder forgot to do before going live.
We've launched 7+ products ourselves — PlasmaPoker, ApplyGlide, Sparknautic, ContentHarvest, and more — and we've shipped client MVPs across multiple industries. This is the exact checklist we run through before every launch. If you skip items on this list, you'll spend your first month fixing things instead of acquiring customers.
Core Features (Items 1-5)
1. User Authentication That Actually Works
Sign up, login, logout, password reset, email verification. Sounds simple. But half the MVPs we've inherited had broken password reset flows or missing email verification. Use a battle-tested solution — Devise for Rails, NextAuth for Next.js, or Auth0 if you want managed auth. Don't roll your own.
2. Payment Processing Connected and Tested
Stripe is the answer for 95% of startups. Set up subscriptions, webhooks for failed payments, and invoice generation. Test the full billing cycle: sign up, subscribe, upgrade, downgrade, cancel. Test with Stripe's test cards for declined payments, expired cards, and 3D Secure. Most founders test the happy path and nothing else.
3. Admin Dashboard
You need a way to see what's happening in your application without querying the database directly. User list, subscription status, recent activity, key metrics. Keep it simple — a few pages that answer "how many users signed up today?" and "is anything broken?"
4. Transactional Emails
Welcome email, password reset, payment confirmation, trial expiring. These aren't marketing emails — they're operational. Use Resend, Postmark, or SendGrid. Set up a custom sending domain so your emails don't land in spam. Test every email template in both Gmail and Outlook.
5. Core Value Delivered in Under 60 Seconds
From the moment a user signs up, how fast do they get value? If the answer is "they need to configure 8 settings first," your onboarding needs work. The fastest path to an "aha moment" is the single most important UX decision in your MVP. For ApplyGlide, users paste a job description and get a tailored resume in under a minute. That speed is intentional.
Infrastructure (Items 6-11)
6. Production Hosting on Real Infrastructure
Heroku is fine for prototyping but expensive at scale. We deploy on DigitalOcean with Capistrano for zero-downtime deploys. Whatever you choose — make sure it's not your local machine or a free tier that throttles under load.
7. SSL Certificate (HTTPS)
Non-negotiable. Let's Encrypt is free. Cloudflare provides it automatically. If your site loads on HTTP in 2026, users will bounce and Google will penalize you. There's no excuse.
8. CI/CD Pipeline
Every push to main should run your test suite automatically. If tests pass, deploy automatically to staging. Use GitHub Actions — it's free for most projects and takes 30 minutes to set up. Manual deployment is how bugs reach production.
9. Database Backups
Automated daily backups with tested restoration. "Tested" is the key word — a backup you've never restored from is not a backup. Set up pg_dump on a cron job and verify you can restore from it at least once before launch.
10. Error Monitoring
When something breaks in production, you need to know immediately — not when a user emails you two days later. We rely on thorough testing with 90%+ coverage to prevent errors from reaching production in the first place, combined with application-level logging and health checks.
11. Uptime Monitoring
UptimeRobot (free) or Better Stack. Checks your site every 5 minutes and alerts you via email/Slack/SMS when it goes down. Takes 2 minutes to set up. No excuse to skip this.
Legal (Items 12-14)
12. Privacy Policy
Required by law in most jurisdictions. Describes what data you collect, how you use it, who you share it with, and how users can request deletion. Use a generator like Termly or iubenda as a starting point, then customize for your specific data practices.
13. Terms of Service
Protects you when things go wrong. Covers acceptable use, liability limitations, refund policy, and termination conditions. Get a template and customize it. If you're handling sensitive data or operating in regulated industries, invest in a lawyer review before launch.
14. GDPR / CCPA Compliance
If you have any users in the EU or California — and you will — you need cookie consent, data export capability, and a deletion mechanism. This isn't optional and the fines are real. Implement a cookie banner and make sure your admin panel can export and delete user data on request.
Marketing (Items 15-18)
15. SEO Basics
Title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, a sitemap.xml, and robots.txt. These take an hour to implement and determine whether Google can find you. Every page should have a unique title tag that includes your target keyword. Our SaaS development service includes full SEO setup.
16. Google Analytics / Plausible
You can't improve what you don't measure. Set up analytics before launch so you have baseline data from day one. Know your traffic sources, bounce rate, and conversion funnel. Plausible is a privacy-friendly alternative that doesn't require cookie consent.
17. Social Media Profiles
Claim your brand name on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, and any platform your users frequent. Even if you don't plan to be active on all of them, claim the handles. Fill out profiles with your URL, a brief description, and a logo.
18. Launch Page or Waitlist
If you're not ready to launch publicly, collect emails. A simple landing page with a headline, a one-sentence description, and an email input converts better than a "Coming Soon" page with no CTA. We build these starting at $1,000. Get an estimate.
Testing (Items 19-21)
19. 90%+ Test Coverage
This is our non-negotiable standard across every product we build. Automated tests catch regressions before they reach users. If you can't refactor a feature without fear of breaking something else, your test coverage is too low. Every model, controller, and critical user flow should have test coverage.
20. Cross-Browser Testing
Test in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and on mobile devices. CSS that looks perfect in Chrome can break in Safari. Forms that work on desktop can be unusable on a phone. At minimum, test your sign-up flow, payment flow, and core feature on an actual phone — not just a browser resize.
21. Load Testing
What happens when 100 users hit your app at the same time? If you plan to launch on Product Hunt or Hacker News, you need to know. Use k6 or Apache Bench to simulate concurrent users and find bottlenecks before real users find them for you.
Pre-Launch Final Checks (Items 22-23)
22. Performance Audit
Run Lighthouse on every key page. Target 90+ on Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, and SEO. Fix anything under 80. Page load speed directly impacts conversion rates — every additional second of load time costs you roughly 7% of conversions.
23. Seed Data and Empty States
What does your app look like when a user has no data? Empty dashboards with no guidance are conversion killers. Design empty states that explain what the user should do next. Add sample data or onboarding flows that guide users to their first action.
The Most Common Mistakes
After shipping dozens of products, here's what trips up founders most often:
- Launching without payment processing tested end-to-end — subscription created, webhook received, access granted, cancellation works
- No transactional emails — users sign up and hear nothing. They forget about you by the next day
- No analytics — you launch, get traffic, and have no idea where it came from or what users did
- Skipping mobile testing — 60%+ of web traffic is mobile. If your sign-up form is broken on phones, you're losing more than half your potential users
- No backup strategy — you only realize you needed backups after the database is gone
Ready to Launch Your MVP?
We build MVPs that are launch-ready from day one — every item on this checklist is standard in our SaaS development service. If you're a founder with an idea and a deadline, let's talk. We'll scope your project, give you a fixed price, and ship it on time. Get a free estimate here.