Ask HN: What was your pre-launch/launch experience like?

For those of you who launched websites, what was your experience like? I'm looking for something like: "about a week before the launch emailed a bunch of blogs, out of the 100 we contacted, 12 wrote stories on us, those 12 stories brought about 12,000 users over the course of 1 week. Out of those 12,000 users, 1,000 ended up being permanent users.