Soft launch or hard launch: which should a small SaaS do?

What each one means

A soft launch opens the product to a limited group without announcing it: a batch from your waitlist, one community, or a share of your users. The goal is to learn, not to reach people. App stores build this into their release tools. Apple’s phased release sends an update to a growing share of users with automatic updates over seven days, and lets you pause it (Apple, phased release). Google Play’s staged rollout sends an update to a percentage of users that you raise over time, and you can halt it if something goes wrong (Google Play, staged rollouts).

A hard launch is the public announcement: the email to your whole list, the Show HN, the Product Hunt day, the posts in every community you belong to. The goal is reach. You get one first impression with each audience, so the product has to be ready for it.

When each fits a small product

A soft launch fits when:

• Nobody outside your circle has used the product yet.
• Setup has steps you haven’t watched a stranger go through.
• A bug in payments, signup or data import would cost you trust you can’t win back.
• You don’t yet know which of your promises people care about most.

A hard launch fits when:

• A batch of new users got through setup without your help.
• You know, in users’ own words, what the product does for them. That becomes the announcement.
• You can handle the support and the bugs a wave of new people brings.

For most small SaaS products the honest answer is: a soft launch first, because the first version always has something that stops new users, then a hard launch once a batch goes through cleanly. Skipping the soft launch spends your one announcement on a product that loses people at step two. Skipping the hard launch means the people who would have paid never hear about it.

How a waitlist lets you do both

A waitlist is a list of people who asked to be told. That makes it the natural pool for both stages.

1. Soft: invite a small batch from the list, the people who look most like your target users. Watch what they do, fix what stops them, then invite the next batch. The details of running batches are on the beta page.
2. Hard: once a batch gets through without help, send the announcement to everyone who is still waiting, and post publicly on the same day or the day after. The people on the list already said they were interested, so they are the most likely to try it that week.

Tell each batch they are early and ask them what confused them. Early users forgive rough edges when they know they are early.

What to measure in each

In the soft launch, measure behaviour, not reach:

• How many invited people signed in at all.
• How many reached the first useful result (your activation step), and where the others stopped.
• What they asked or complained about, in their words.
• Whether they came back in the second week.

In the hard launch, measure reach and outcome by source:

• Visits and signups per channel. Tag every link you share with its own UTM campaign, including the link in the announcement email.
• How many people who got the email came back and signed up.
• Who paid within 30 days, and where they came from.

Write down what success means for each stage before you start. Deciding afterwards makes every result look fine.

With Nordva Launch

The Launch waitlist keeps each signup’s source and position. On Indie, you invite the next batch in signup order, or one person by email, and Launch sends the invitations; the launch announcement email goes to everyone who hasn’t unsubscribed (one per project per 24 hours), and its launch report shows who paid within 30 days of their email. Analytics with UTM tags covers the public posts on every plan. Start free, no card needed.