beehiivIt’s 3 PM on launch day. Your Show HN post went up at nine. You have the post open, the analytics open, the newsletter dashboard open, the checklist in a doc and Stripe in another tab, in case someone pays.
You refresh them in a loop. Then you look up and realize you haven’t answered a comment in forty minutes.
A launch dashboard puts all of it on one screen you can glance at between replies. Context Board has one ready to go, called Launch week.
What goes on a launch dashboard
The Launch week template has the pieces a launch needs.
- Countdown: days, hours and minutes to launch day. Once the day passes, it counts up instead, so on the day it tells you how long you’ve been live.
- Subscribers goal: a ring toward a number you pick, 500 to start.
- Visitors today: a number with its change and a sparkline.
- Launch checklist: landing page live and fast, pricing and checkout tested end to end, launch post written, demo video recorded, ten people lined up to share it, analytics checked on the real domain. Change any of it.
- Subscribers: a chart of the last 30 days, and a list of where they came from.
- Hacker News: the Show HN page as it moves.
- Launch notes: for the things you’ll want to remember next time.
No template ships a number, so each widget waits for its source and says so.
Connecting signups, traffic and Show HN
Signups come from wherever they land. A beehiiv or Buttondown key gives you subscribers. Supabase signs in for rows in your database. Or have your app send its count to the board with one web request, and the goal ring and chart both fill from it.
Traffic comes from Plausible, with visitors today, top pages and sources, or from Google Analytics. Its widgets show complete days, so launch day shows up there the morning after.
The Hacker News widget is free and needs no account. It reads the top of Show HN with each post’s points and comments, so while your post is up there, you watch it climb. To follow one post anywhere on the site, connect its address on Hacker News’s own API and pick its score.
Want first sales too? Stripe and Lemon Squeezy connect in a minute.
On the day
Set each source to refresh as often as every two minutes while the board is open, or use Refresh now in a widget’s menu. Press F for full screen on a second monitor and leave it there.
Tick the checklist as you go. Ask your agent to “add reply to the Reddit thread to my launch checklist” and it finds the list. Share the board as a live, read-only link if you’re building in public, and people can watch the numbers move with you.
When the week’s over, keep the board as a record, or delete it. A deleted board stays in the trash for 30 days.