What to Post on Launch Day: A Video Checklist for Indie Makers

The week before launch, most makers produce one video. It goes on Product Hunt, gets cross-posted to X, dropped into a LinkedIn post, and pasted into a Reddit thread where it gets three upvotes and a comment asking why you're advertising.

The problem isn't the video. It's that these are five different rooms, and the same thirty seconds cannot work in all of them. A Product Hunt visitor has already decided to evaluate products today. Someone scrolling X has not. A subreddit has explicitly not.

You don't need five times the work. You need one afternoon of recording and five different cuts. Here's what each one wants.

Before launch week: record the raw material

Everything below is assembled from the same pile. Get this pile first, in one sitting:

• A complete run of your core task, unhurried, real-looking data, 60–90 seconds of raw footage
• The result on its own — whatever your product produces, held on screen with nothing moving
• The problem state — the messy spreadsheet, the tab overload, the manual process, whatever your product replaces
• Two or three specific moments worth isolating: the thing that's surprisingly fast, the thing nobody expects it to handle, the number that goes up

Seed a demo account with plausible data before you start. Not test123 and not a dashboard reading zero. This one preparation step affects every cut you make afterward, and it's the one most often skipped.

Product Hunt: the 30-second no-context cut

Your visitor is scanning a list. They will give you the length of a shrug.

• Length: 30 seconds, hard ceiling
• Open on: the finished output, before any explanation
• Must be legible at: small size, muted, on a laptop trackpad scroll
• Skip: your logo, your name, the origin story

The gallery's first frame is doing more work than the video, because a lot of people never press play. Make frame one a complete visual statement of what the product produces — not a title card, not a hero shot of your landing page.

One thing worth doing that almost nobody does: record a fifteen-second answer to "how is this different from [the obvious alternative]" and keep it in your pocket. This is the comparison angle in its shortest possible form, and the alternative is usually a spreadsheet rather than a competitor. That question arrives in the comments on every launch, and a video reply posted in the first hour reads as confidence rather than defensiveness.

X / Twitter: the loop

This is the least forgiving room. Autoplay, muted, and you're between a screenshot of someone's revenue chart and a video of a capybara.

• Length: 8–15 seconds, and it should loop cleanly
• Open on: motion or contrast — never a static screen
• Text on screen: yes, large, one short line
• Voiceover: pointless here, nobody hears it

The before/after split is the strongest thing you can post here, because the comparison completes in the time you have. A full walkthrough does not.

Put the actual explanation in the post text above the video, not inside it. On this platform the video's only job is to stop the scroll long enough for someone to read your first line.

If you're doing a launch thread, don't attach the same clip to every post. One clip per point — the isolated moments you recorded earlier are exactly this. Threads with a different visual on each beat get read further down.

LinkedIn: the slow one

Different audience, different pace. People here will actually watch 45 seconds, and the tone that works on X reads as unserious.

• Length: 45–60 seconds
• Open on: the problem, stated plainly, as a sentence on screen — see the pain point angle for how specific that sentence needs to be
• Structure: problem → what you built → what changed, measurable if possible
• Captions: mandatory, most of the feed is silent

This is also the one place where the founder's face and a first-person framing genuinely helps. "We spent six months watching support teams copy-paste tickets into spreadsheets, so we built this" performs better here than a pure product cut. It's the same footage with a different first ten seconds.

Reddit: probably not a video at all

Read the room. Most subreddits will punish a launch video on sight, and posting one to r/SaaS or a niche community without context is the fastest way to get your launch associated with spam.

Where video works on Reddit, it's narrow:

• In a subreddit that explicitly has a Show-and-tell or Self-promo thread
• As a reply in a comment thread where someone asked how something works
• As a raw, unpolished screen recording — the more produced it looks, the worse it does here

The cut that fits is the least edited one you have: one task, no music, no text overlays, no logo. Reddit trusts artifacts, not advertisements. If your only asset is the polished 30-second version, don't post it; write the comment instead and link a plain recording.

Your email list: the longest one you'll make

These people already opted in. They're the only audience that will watch two minutes, and the only one where a walkthrough is appropriate.

• Length: up to 2 minutes
• Structure: what you shipped, what it does, one specific example, what to do next
• Thumbnail: matters more than the video — most email clients won't autoplay, so a still with a legible caption is what actually gets clicked

Host it and link it rather than embedding raw video; most email clients strip it. A clean still image linking to the video does the job.

Your own site: the one that stays

Everything above is disposable. This one is on the landing page next month.

• Length: 60–90 seconds
• Should survive: being watched with the sound on, by someone deliberately evaluating you
• Include: the complete task, the result, one honest limitation if there is an obvious one

Naming a limitation on your own site sounds like it costs you something. In practice it converts, because the visitor is already looking for the catch and finding it stated plainly is more reassuring than not finding it at all.

The day-of sequence

A rough shape that works:

Two days before — post one isolated moment with no launch framing at all. Just the interesting bit. This warms up the accounts you'll be posting from and gives you a read on which framing gets a reaction.

Launch morning — Product Hunt cut goes live with the listing. X loop within the first hour, since that's when the thread has a chance of catching. Email goes out early enough for your timezone majority to open it during the morning.

Midday — LinkedIn. It has a slower distribution curve, so a later post is fine.

Afternoon — the difference-from-alternative reply, posted into wherever the comparison question has appeared by then. It will have appeared.

Day two and three — the launch isn't over. The isolated moments you recorded are three or four more posts, and they'll reach people who never saw day one. Most makers stop posting the moment the launch-day traffic dips, which is roughly when the second wave of people would have found it.

What actually goes wrong

One video, five places. The thing this whole checklist exists to prevent. The 30-second Product Hunt cut on X is eighteen seconds too long, and the X loop on your landing page is too thin to convince anyone.

Saving the good part for the end. In every cut above, the payoff goes first. You are not building suspense; you are competing for the next two seconds.

A demo account full of zeros. A dashboard reading $0 / 0 users / no activity undermines a technically fine video more than any editing mistake.

Nothing prepared for the comparison question. It always comes. Having an answer ready, ideally as a short recording, turns the most predictable moment of your launch into the most persuasive one.

Treating launch day as the deadline. The videos that keep working are the ones posted in the two weeks after, when you've seen which framing landed and can make three more of that kind. If you are short on framings to try, the angle library is a menu of twelve.

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This is roughly the batch Angles produces from one product brief — the same material cut into different structures and lengths. Whether you generate it or record it yourself, the channel-by-channel requirements above don't change.