[lunaru]

There's no rule of thumb when it comes to launching. Everyone recites the rhetoric of release early and iterate often, but that can lead to releasing a premature product.

Your product only has one reputation, so more important than "when" is "how". You'll want to make sure you have at least a differentiating feature, a marketing plan in place, and a good initial spike of users to even begin to draw worthwhile feedback. Having small sample sizes just leads to noise, which can then lead to even more indecision than you began with.

The best way to think of a launch is not as a switch you flip, but as a reveal that you build up to. The balsamiq guy had a great blog post about prepping for launch: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2008/04/18/preparing-for-launch...

It's as close to a video game walkthrough as you'll find.

[dsil]

Here's how I prepare for a launch:

1) log on to server 2) svn up 3) go to apache directory 4) bin/restart

[jganetsk]

Same for me, except change step 2 to "git pull" and 5) sound the alarm