Checklist before you ship your project

You built the thing — before the link goes public, spend thirty minutes on this checklist. It catches the problems that make first-time visitors bounce. One: walk the core flow as a brand-new user, on your phone, in a private browser window. No cached session, no desktop-sized screen, no founder knowledge. If you hesitate anywhere, a stranger quits there. Two: try to break the forms. Submit empty fields, paste a novel into the name box, use an email like "test@test". Every input should fail politely instead of crashing or accepting garbage. Three: check the empty states. A new account with no data should see a friendly nudge toward the first action — not a blank screen that looks broken. Four: secrets and test data. No API keys in client code, no "asdf" posts on the public feed, no admin password of "admin". Rotate anything you even suspect leaked during development. Five: set up the minimum observability — error tracking and a simple uptime check. You want to know it broke before your users tell you. None of this takes engineering heroics. It takes deciding that the first impression matters — because for most visitors, it is the only one you get.