Most of the work of running a waitlist happens before launch day. What's left in the final 48 hours is smaller, but it's also the part people skip when they're excited to finally ship, which is exactly when a small mistake becomes a public one.
Check the page itself
Confirm your countdown behavior
If your page has a countdown, decide now what happens when it hits zero: does the page keep collecting signups, or switch to a "we've launched" message pointing people at the real product? Getting this wrong means new visitors land on a countdown for a launch that already happened.
Review your branding one more time
Logo, color, font pairing, whatever you set when you first built the page is probably not what you'd choose with a finished product in front of you. A five-minute pass here before launch costs nothing and saves you from screenshots of an unfinished-looking page circulating after you're live.
Check the parts people don't see
Your mailing address is set
Every broadcast you send needs a real mailing address attached. If you haven't set one, or you're still relying on the default, confirm it now, not after your launch email has already gone out to everyone.
Your referral rewards still make sense
If you set reward thresholds early on, revisit them before launch. A reward tier that made sense at 50 signups might be trivially easy, or impossible, at 2,000. Adjust thresholds now rather than disappointing your most active referrers on the day it matters most.
Check the send itself
Draft the launch broadcast ahead of time, don't write it live
Write and review your launch email before launch day arrives, not in the moment. Rereading it a few hours later, with less adrenaline, is how you catch the line that sounded better in your head than it reads on a screen.
Know your credit balance before you send
A broadcast to your full list has a real cost. Check your balance before you hit send so you're not caught short mid-launch, nothing undercuts a big moment like a failed send because you ran out of credits halfway through.
Get your waitlist launch-ready
Everything on this list, countdown behavior, branding, mailing address, referral rewards, lives on your waitlist's customize page, so a final pass before launch takes minutes, not hours.
None of this is complicated. It's just easy to skip when you're focused on the product itself. Fifteen minutes against this list is cheap insurance against the one day you can't afford a mistake on.
