A micro-SaaS launch plan that can say "stop"

The checklist problem

Launch checklists are mostly about building: pick a stack, set up billing, write the landing page, ship. Each step assumes the previous one was worth doing. None of them asks whether you should stop.

AI tools make this worse in a quiet way. When an assistant can scaffold an app in an afternoon, building stops feeling like a commitment. The cost of the wrong idea moves from "months of code" to "months of trying to sell something nobody asked for", which is harder to notice and just as expensive.

Stopping early is the cheap outcome

The most useful property a launch plan can have is that each stage can end in "stop", and says in advance what that looks like. Deciding the kill condition before you start matters, because after a weekend of work, every result looks like encouragement.

Stopping at the evidence stage costs a weekend. Stopping after launch costs months. A plan that never stops you is not saving you time.

Five decisions, in order

Who, and against what. Name one buyer, one job they need done and one alternative you beat. "Developers" is not a buyer; a specific role with a specific recurring problem is. If you cannot name the alternative they use today, you have not found the problem yet.

What you learned that you did not already believe. Validation is not collecting agreement. Talk to people who have the problem and write down what surprised you. If nothing did, you were confirming an idea, not testing it, and that is a reason to stop or to go back to the first stage.

The smallest thing. Decide what ships in the first week and, just as explicitly, what does not. The list of what does not ship is the part that protects you from building the whole product before anyone has paid.

One price, defended. Pick one number and write the answers to the three objections you expect. A price you cannot defend in writing will be discounted in the first conversation.

Ten named people. Distribution at the start is not a channel, it is a list of people you can reach and ask. If you cannot name ten, the plan has to say so before you build anything.

Where AI helps, and where it misleads

AI assistants are good at drafting interview questions, outreach messages and landing copy, and at playing a sceptical buyer. They are bad at validation, because a model asked whether an idea is good will usually find reasons it is. Use them to prepare conversations with real people, never to replace those conversations.

What this is not

It is not a business plan with a five-year projection, and it is not a growth playbook: it ends at the first ten customers, because what works at ten and what works at a thousand have little in common. It also says nothing about the stack, which is the least consequential decision at this stage and a common way of avoiding the first one.

Putting it into practice

The AI Micro-SaaS Launch Kit is this plan as five worksheets, one per stage, each ending with its kill criterion. It includes outreach, interview and landing-copy templates, one idea worked through all five stages including the pivot, and the AI prompts for each stage with their failure modes.

Once a product exists and runs agents in production, measuring whether a change to the setup helped is covered in "it felt better" is not a benchmark for your coding agent.