Think of the potentially cool sites that were ruined by a poor launch day performance. The Google/Monopoly mashup of a few months ago is the best example I can

Think of the potentially cool sites that were ruined by a poor launch day performance. The Google/Monopoly mashup of a few months ago is the best example I can think of recently. They launched, the servers crashed and burned from the load, and by the time they were fully operational (almost a week), no one was interested any more. You would have to know your competition is going to be launched with a bare-bones setup, or at least that they have a considerably lower estimate of their launch users than you do. At that point, make sure your users know about the competition, and go down right when it launches. No guarantee it will work, and if they manage to weather the beating from increased users you will probably lose quite a few, but there is the potential...