Don't push to production and start promoting without doing a raw QA test first.
You finally finished building. You deployed your frontend, your backend microservices are humming, and you are ready to start blasting your link on Reddit, X, and Product Hunt.
Stop. Have you actually had a stranger QA test it yet?
As developers, we suffer from the "Builder's Blind Spot." We know exactly how our app is supposed to be used, so we subconsciously click the right sequences. We don't click the random footer links, and we don't try to break the auth flow.
I have seen so many founders spend weeks hyping up a launch, only to burn all that hard-earned traffic because of bugs they were completely blind to. Recently, I've seen things like:
The "Dead End" CTA: A beautifully designed "Apply via Email" button on a partnership page that is completely unresponsive because it’s missing a simple >!href!< or an >!onClick!< event.
The White Screen of Death: A routing error on a specific blog post link that just renders a blank white screen, making the user think the site is completely down.
The Auth Flicker: A pricing page that incorrectly routes logged-out users to the secure dashboard for a split second before kicking them back to the login screen, making the app feel like a security risk.
When you are deep in the code, you miss these things. Before you spend a dime on ads or burn your one "Launch Day" post in a community, get someone who didn't write the code to try and break your UI.
It is infinitely better to find a critical bug now than to find out 100 potential users bounced because your checkout button was disabled on mobile.
Test your stuff, folks!