Ellie · The Pre-Launch Checklist for Apps (Waste Zero of Apple's Launch Traffic)

01The Full Story: Treating the Pre-Launch Process Like a Product

Chris Raroque is an indie developer best known for the productivity app Ellie. He doesn't talk about how much any particular app earned — instead he lays out, in full, the pre-launch checklist he's refined over and over: the fixed process he runs before shipping every new app. The starting point isn't a marketing trick, it's a platform fact most people ignore: Apple gives every brand-new app an extra boost of organic traffic for roughly the first two weeks. That exposure is free and the platform hands it to you, but only once. His argument is blunt: since that traffic is coming regardless, the only thing you control is whether you catch it. A bad store listing, blurry screenshots, an unprepared landing page — that's pouring traffic into a bucket with no bottom, and there's no second chance, ever. So he standardizes every pre-launch action: waitlist page, analytics, feedback board, email sequence, store listing, landing page — all of it in place, nothing skipped. This isn't a business, it's an execution checklist. It doesn't solve "which app to build"; it solves "how not to blow a great opening hand once the app is built." For anyone about to ship an iOS app, ticking through it avoids the most common — and most expensive — mistake there is.