Building LaunchPad: one product brief, 42 launch channels, and the bugs that almost sank it

Launching a Product: A Translation Problem

Launching a product is a translation problem. Hacker News punishes anything that smells like marketing. X gives you 280 characters. The Play Store gives you 30 for a title and 80 for the short description, and the Chrome Web Store will reject a keyword-stuffed name outright. Same product, fifteen dialects.

I kept paying that tax on my own extension launches, so I built LaunchPad: you write one product brief, and it drafts a native post for 42 channels — each in that channel's voice, with its real character limits enforced at generation time. It launched on Product Hunt this weekend. This post is about the parts that were harder than they looked.

The Stack

React 18 + Vite on AWS Amplify, Lambda + DynamoDB + API Gateway behind Cognito, Terraform for everything. The interesting choice is the AI layer: there isn't a server-side one. Drafting runs either on Chrome's built-in Gemini Nano (the Prompt API — free, on-device, nothing leaves your machine) or against the user's own OpenAI/Claude key, called directly from the browser. My servers never see a prompt, a draft, or a key. That's a privacy feature and a business model at once: my marginal cost per free user is roughly zero, so the entire product can be free for your first launch.