Your MVP Launched. Now What? The First 30 Days After Ship.

Launch day gets all the attention. You post on social media, tell your friends, maybe submit to Product Hunt. For about 48 hours, it feels like progress.

Then Day 3 hits. Traffic drops. Signups slow. You realize you have no plan for what comes next.

This is where most MVPs die. Not because the product was bad, but because the founder treated launch as the finish line instead of the starting line. The first 30 days after ship determine whether your MVP becomes a real product or joins the graveyard of apps nobody uses.

Here is the 3-phase playbook.

Phase 1: Days 1-7 — Get 10 real users and instrument everything

Your only goal in Week 1 is to get 10 people actively using your product. Not 10 signups. Ten people who complete the core action your product was built for.

If your MVP is a booking platform, 10 users means 10 completed bookings. If it is a SaaS tool, 10 users means 10 people who have completed the primary workflow. Signups without activation are vanity metrics at this stage.

How to get your first 10 users:

Do not run ads. Do not post in 15 Facebook groups. Do things that do not scale:

• Direct outreach to 30-50 people who match your ICP. Personal messages, not mass emails. “I built this to solve [problem]. Would you try it and tell me what breaks?” works better than any landing page.
• Tap your existing network. Friends of friends who have the problem. LinkedIn connections. People who expressed interest during your build phase.
• Offer to sit with them. Watch someone use your product over Zoom. You will learn more in 15 minutes of screen-sharing than in a week of analytics dashboards.

Set up analytics (this is non-negotiable):

If you ship without analytics, you are flying blind. Track:

• Activation events: Did the user complete the core action? (e.g., “booking_completed,” “report_generated,” “first_message_sent”)
• Drop-off points: Where do users abandon the flow?
• Session frequency: Are users coming back?

Tool recommendations (free to start):

• PostHog (open-source, free tier of 1 million events/month): Best for product analytics and session recordings. You can see exactly where users get stuck.
• Mixpanel (free up to 20 million events/month): Better for funnel analysis and retention tracking.

Pick one. Instrument your core flow. This takes 2-4 hours with either tool. Do it on Day 1 or Day 2.

Fix critical bugs immediately:

Your first users will find bugs your QA missed. That is expected. If you built with a 21-day sprint process, you should have a 30-day bug guarantee covering this. Prioritize bugs that block the core workflow. Cosmetic issues can wait.

Phase 2: Days 8-14 — Run 5 user interviews and ship one fix

By Day 8, you should have enough usage data to form a hypothesis about your product’s biggest friction point. Validate it with conversations.

How to run a useful user interview (15 minutes):

Schedule 5 calls with users from Week 1. Not your friends. Actual users. The script:

1. “Walk me through the last time you used [product]. What were you trying to do?” (Listen. Do not defend.)
2. “Was there a point where you got stuck or confused?” (They will tell you. The answer is almost never what you expected.)
3. “If you could change one thing about the product, what would it be?” (Ignore feature requests. Listen for the underlying problem.)
4. “Would you recommend this to a colleague? Why or why not?” (This is your early signal for product-market fit.)

Identify the number-one friction point:

After 5 interviews, a pattern will emerge. It is usually one of:

• Onboarding confusion: Users do not understand what to do first.
• Core workflow friction: Users understand the product but the primary action takes too many steps.
• Value clarity: Users complete the workflow but do not understand the value they received.

Pick the single biggest friction point. Not the three biggest. One.

Ship one fix before Day 14:

Build and deploy one improvement that addresses the top friction point. If onboarding is the issue, simplify the first screen. If the workflow has too many steps, cut two. If value clarity is the problem, add a results summary screen.

This is not about perfecting the product. It is about proving the product evolves based on feedback. Users who see their input implemented become loyal users.

Phase 3: Days 15-30 — Decide: iterate, pivot, or scale

This is where data replaces feelings.

By Day 15, you should have 2-3 weeks of usage data. Here are the metrics that matter and the thresholds that inform your decision:

Metrics to track:

• Daily Active Users (DAU): Track the trend line, not the absolute number. Is it flat, growing, or declining?
• Activation rate: What percentage of signups complete the core action? Below 20% means your onboarding needs major work. Above 40% is strong for an MVP.
• Week-1 retention: Of users who signed up in Week 1, what percentage came back in Week 2? Below 10% is a red flag. Above 25% is worth investing in.
• Qualitative signal: Are users asking when the next feature is coming? Are they telling others about it unprompted?

The decision framework:

Iterate if: Activation above 20%, some users retained, and feedback points to fixable friction. This is the most common outcome. Plan v2 features using a disciplined scope approach so you do not fall into the traps that slow down MVPs.

Pivot if: Activation rate is below 10% despite fixing onboarding, users are not returning, and interview feedback suggests the core value proposition is wrong. A pivot does not mean starting over. It means shifting focus based on what you learned. Maybe your marketplace should actually be a portfolio tool. Maybe your project management app’s best feature is reporting, not the task board.

Scale if: Retention is strong (above 30% week-over-week), users are referring others organically, and the bottleneck is awareness, not product quality. This is rare at Day 30, but it happens. Shift energy from product improvement to distribution.

The trap to avoid: building in a vacuum

The single most dangerous thing you can do after launch is disappear into your codebase for 60 days, building features nobody asked for.

I have seen founders spend $15,000 on post-launch development — adding features, redesigning interfaces — only to discover that the 12 users they launched with all churned in Week 2 because nobody followed up.

Talk to users first. Build second. Every week.

What to do right now

If your MVP launches this week, do these three things today:

1. Set up PostHog or Mixpanel. Instrument your signup event and your core action event. Two events. That is all you need to start.
2. Write a list of 30 people to contact personally. Not a social media blast. Thirty individual messages to people who have the problem your product solves.
3. Block 5 calendar slots in Week 2 for 15-minute user interviews. Put them on the calendar now, even before you have users confirmed.

Download our Launch Readiness Checklist to make sure your MVP is operationally ready for real users before you start outreach.