Going to production

Production readiness is a checklist, not a feeling. Secrets out of the code and into environment variables. Test data wiped. Error pages that do not leak stack traces. A custom domain with SSL. Backups turned on for the database. Then add the two things you cannot retrofit after an incident: error monitoring, so you hear about crashes before users tweet them, and at least a weekly database backup you have actually restored once. Launch small on purpose: share with ten users, watch the logs for a day, fix what surfaces, then widen. A quiet first week in production is the best growth hack there is.