There's many things to do pre-launch. For a consumer product, they can include: 1) Starting a blog and establishing yourself as an expert. At the very least, a

There's many things to do pre-launch. For a consumer product, they can include: 1) Starting a blog and establishing yourself as an expert. At the very least, at least get some content out there for search engines to crawl. 2) Establishing yourself in forums. This is important because if you just sign up as a new user when the product is done, don't expect anyone to take your pitches seriously. If you got some reputation under your belt though, people will listen. 3) Email leads You want to start a relationship with people, especially bloggers. Don't talk about selling anything to anyone, or even talk about your idea. Just ask questions, get to know them, and when the time comes, you can either tell them what you did, or say "Hey, look at this, I just found this out..." 4) Brainstorm about network effects. There's the product but there's the other stuff that helps makes the product more viral. They can include things such as widgets to embed in blogs, etc. 5) Get some links to your site. This is in line with #1. If you start a blog, the links will naturally flow in. This will lessen the time until search engines gives your site more trust. If you can launch your site in 2 steps, do so.. For instance, if there's a section for content(articles, how-to's, etc) and a section for the actual product, launch the content first.