The Post-Launch SaaS Checklist: 30 Things Most Teams Skip

Launch is exhilarating. The 90 days after are where SaaS companies are quietly made or broken. Here are 30 things most teams skip post-launch that come back to haunt them.

Key takeaways

Post-launch is its own discipline. The list below covers observability, runbooks, security, support, analytics, growth, and team. Skip them at your peril.

The 30 items

Observability (1-5)

1. Centralize logs. Not in app, not in CloudWatch alone. Datadog, Grafana Loki, or equivalent.
2. Application performance monitoring. APM trace for every request. Datadog APM, Sentry Performance.
3. Real user monitoring. Frontend performance from actual users' browsers.
4. Synthetic monitoring. Uptime checks from multiple regions.
5. Cost dashboards. Monthly AWS/GCP cost broken down by service.

Operations (6-10)

6. Runbooks for top 5 incidents. Database is down. Payment processing fails. Email delivery breaks. Auth provider outage. CDN slow.
7. On-call rotation. Even a small team. Use PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or BetterStack.
8. Backup verification. Backups that haven't been restored aren't backups. Test restore monthly.
9. Disaster recovery plan. What's your RPO and RTO? Documented.
10. Status page. Public (statuspage.io, instatus) for customer trust.

Security (11-15)

11. External pentest. Get one within 3 months of launch.
12. Dependency scanning. Snyk, Dependabot, Trivy. Automated.
13. Secrets rotation. Quarterly minimum.
14. Access reviews. Quarterly, who has prod access? Why?
15. Security training. Annual. Not optional.

Support (16-20)

16. Support tool. Helpscout, Intercom, Zendesk. Pick one.
17. Knowledge base. Articles for top 20 questions.
18. SLA documented. Response time commitments to customers.
19. Bug triage process. Where do customer-reported bugs go? Who decides priority?
20. Customer feedback loop. How does feedback reach product?

Analytics (21-25)

21. Product analytics. Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog. Wire core events.
22. Conversion funnel. Signup → activation → first value. Measured.
23. Retention cohorts. Weekly cohorts; track activity over time.
24. NPS or CSAT. Wootric, Delighted. Quarterly minimum.
25. Health score model. Per-account health score driving CS interventions.

Growth (26-30)

26. SEO foundation. Sitemap, robots, structured data, Open Graph.
27. Blog/content engine. Publishing cadence.
28. Email lifecycle. Welcome, activation, milestone, retention.
29. Partnership pipeline. Integration partners, referral partners.
30. Hiring plan. Next 3 hires, with role priority.

What we recommend

Walk the list within 90 days of launch. Tick what's done; schedule what isn't. Most teams skip 10-15 of these and pay for it in months 6-12.

FAQs

All 30 at launch? No, first 10 are urgent (observability + operations + security). Spread the rest over 3 months.

Who owns this? Engineering lead with founder oversight. CS and growth own their sections.

What about compliance items (SOC 2, etc.)? Separate track; we have a dedicated post on that.

Talk to Techpuvi about post-launch engineering.