The T-minus plan: six weeks of launch content, counted back from your date.

Five days buys you a week of announcement. It costs you the fortnight where people decide they have the problem your product solves. Skip that fortnight and the announcement reaches people who never heard the problem, so you're asking strangers to care on the spot.

I plan every launch the other way round. The plan starts at the date and counts back in weeks, which is where the name comes from. Planning forwards, you start early and keep adding ideas, and by launch week you have plenty of content and no order to it. Counting back, you run out of weeks, and at six weeks out you can see there's no room for a second shoot day while there's still time to change the plan.

There are four phases.

T-6: plot

Six weeks out, the date goes at the top of the content plan before a single asset exists, because you schedule every piece of content against it. Then you decide the claim and the audience.

The claim is the sentence a stranger would repeat to a friend, in the pub, with your logo nowhere near it. It's the hardest part of the plan and the cheapest to change, so it comes first. If you can't write it at T-6, the shoot at T-4 has nothing to point the camera at.

The audience is whoever buys in the first week. Name them by job or by habit and write everything for them. A second audience can wait for week two.

T-4 to T-2: build

One shoot day. From it you get a hero film, the cutdowns it becomes, and the statics people will see four times, all built on the one claim.

One day is enough when the shot list exists before anyone books a camera. You plan the edit first and shoot to it. If you know before the shoot that the hero film opens on the product in the first frame, that's a setup on the list, and nobody has to rescue it in the edit. If a launch looks like it needs a second day, I rewrite the list until it doesn't.

In the last week of this phase, you sign off the edit and load the whole run-up into the scheduler, so nothing in the next fortnight gets made in the week it goes out.

T-2 to T-0: the run-up

Fourteen days, in a fixed order. On days 14 to 10 you post the problem, with no date and no finished product. On days 9 to 4 the date goes public, and every post adds one thing the last one didn't show. Days 3 to 1 are proof: early reviews and the product in use, for everyone who has followed along since day 14.

The order matters more than the number of posts. Fourteen posts that each repeat the announcement give people no reason to keep reading, and the date arrives to a room that stopped listening on day eleven. The Vibe Check on 3 December takes these fourteen days apart, post by post.

T-0: launch day

You make nothing new on launch day. The posts went into the scheduler at T-1. Your job on the day is replying to comments and DMs, including the friend who forwards it with a question. Anything unfinished at T-1 goes out in week two.

By bedtime the night before, you've checked the first post is booked and the next day's is scheduled, saved answers to the obvious questions, opened the link on a phone, and put someone else on the inbox.

After the date

The plan carries on past T-0, because plenty of your buyers saw the announcement once and meant to come back to it at the weekend. Four more pieces catch them: proof three days after launch, the thinking behind one decision after a week, the most common objection answered after ten days, and an email at two weeks with the story so far. You draft all four before launch day, while you still have the energy, and drop in the real reviews and numbers as they arrive.

It's the plan I run whenever a launch gives me six weeks. The date goes in first, and the rest of the plan hangs off it.

Write your date at the top of the map and count back six Mondays. If today falls after the first one, the map's starting-late band says what to cut at T-4 and at T-2, so you can begin from the phase you're in.

Tyler / Vibe Shift Studio · London