--- title: Whats the best way for app developers to produce excitement for an upcoming app description: Learn how app developers can build genuine pre-launch excitement, turning early interest into loyal users through psychology, community and smart timing. image: https://weareaffective.com/hubfs/learning-centre-images/whats-the-best-way-for-app-developers-to-produce-excitement-for-an-upcoming-app.webp --- [Skip to content](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/whats-the-best-way-for-app-developers-to-produce-excitement-for-an-upcoming-app#main-content) [![we\_are\_affective\_logo\_200](https://weareaffective.com/hs-fs/hubfs/we_are_affective_logo_200.png?width=175&height=48&name=we_are_affective_logo_200.png "we_are_affective_logo_200")](https://weareaffective.com) - [Home](https://weareaffective.com) - About Us - [Our Story](https://weareaffective.com/about) - [How We Work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) - Our Services - [App Planning & Strategy](https://weareaffective.com/app-planning-strategy) - [App Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-design-agency) - [App UX Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ux-design) - [App UI Design](https://weareaffective.com/app-ui-design) - [App Technical Architecture](https://weareaffective.com/app-architecture) - [Existing App Audits](https://weareaffective.com/app-audit) - [Case Studies](https://weareaffective.com/case-studies) - [Pricing](https://weareaffective.com/pricing) - [Learning Centre](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre) - [Get Started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) Expert Guide Series # Whats the best way for app developers to produce excitement for an upcoming app Table of Contents Excitement before a product launches is not guaranteed by having a good product. Plenty of genuinely useful apps have arrived quietly and stayed that way, while others with far less substance have built long waitlists before a single line of code was written. The difference is rarely budget. It comes down to whether the people building the app understand what actually produces anticipation in another human being, and what produces mere awareness. > Pre-launch is about producing genuine anticipation, not just visible awareness. Awareness and anticipation are not the same thing. Someone can see your post, register that something is coming, and feel nothing that would make them act. Anticipation is the feeling that something will matter to them personally, that they will be worse off for missing it. Getting from awareness to that feeling is a psychological problem, and treating it as a marketing one is where most pre-launch efforts fall apart. What follows is our thinking on how to build that kind of genuine excitement, drawing on the behavioural principles that shape how people form desire and commit to new things, and on the specific approaches we have found that actually produce results. ## Why Pre-Launch Excitement Is a Psychological Problem, Not a Marketing One When app developers think about pre-launch buzz, they tend to think in channels: social media posts, influencer partnerships, press coverage, email lists. These are distribution mechanisms, not psychological ones. They answer the question of where to put content, not what the content needs to do to a person's emotional state. Excitement is an emotional state. It requires a person to feel personally implicated in what is coming, to believe that the thing will change something for them, and to feel some uncertainty about whether they will get access. Remove any of those three elements and you have something that looks like marketing but produces no felt response. The mistake most developers make is assuming that describing the product clearly is sufficient to produce desire. It is not. Rational understanding of what something does is completely separate from the emotional pull to have it. A fitness app can tell a potential user about its tracking features, its interface design, and its coaching methodology. None of that produces the specific feeling that this is for them and they need to be in at launch. That feeling comes from [identity resonance, from scarcity, and from social belonging](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-do-some-apps-feel-like-they-were-made-just-for-you). These are [psychological mechanisms with well-understood structures](https://weareaffective.com/user-psychology-app-design). Treating pre-launch as a marketing problem means optimising the distribution of information. Treating it as a psychological problem means understanding what emotional sequence you need to produce in a person and then designing the content, the timing, and the mechanics to produce it. ## The Difference Between Noise and Genuine Anticipation A lot of pre-launch activity produces impressions, not desire. The metrics look fine: reach goes up, follower counts tick forward, email signups accumulate. But on launch day, the conversion from list to active user is disappointing, and the team is left trying to work out why their efforts did not translate. The answer is usually that the content generated noise rather than genuine anticipation. Noise is content that is seen and forgotten. Anticipation is a state the audience carries with them between touchpoints, a background awareness that something is coming that matters to them. #### What Genuine Anticipation Feels Like Genuine anticipation has a few consistent characteristics. The audience member checks for updates unprompted. They mention the product to other people before it launches. They feel mild anxiety about whether they will get early access. None of these behaviours are produced by informative posts about features. They are produced by content that makes someone feel the product is for people like them, that access might be limited, and that others they identify with are already involved. #### Why Noise Is Easier to Produce Noise is the default because it requires no psychological understanding of the audience. It is relatively simple to produce consistent content about what a product does. It is considerably harder to understand what a specific person needs to feel before they will form a genuine desire for something that does not yet exist. The work of getting there is the work that most pre-launch plans skip entirely. ## UX/UI design built around *real* psychology We design app interfaces around how people actually think and behave. User research, psychology-driven UX/UI design and technical specs delivered as one complete package. [See how we work](https://weareaffective.com/how-we-work) [Get started](https://weareaffective.com/get-started) No commitment ## Building Desire Before the Product Exists The practical challenge with pre-launch is that you cannot let people experience the product. You cannot give them the thing that would produce the feeling you are trying to create. So you have to work backwards: what is the emotional outcome the product will eventually deliver, and how do you create a version of that feeling through the pre-launch content and community itself? This is where most pre-launch content fails. It describes the product rather than producing the emotion the product is built to produce. A wellness app that will eventually make users feel more in control of their health should be producing a version of that feeling in its pre-launch content, not simply listing its features. > Describe the product and people understand it. Produce the feeling and they want it. We advise clients building pre-launch awareness on social media to tease what they are building through sneak peeks and drip-fed content, but to avoid committing to a specific launch date until the product is confirmed ready. As confidence in the timeline grows, language can narrow progressively from "coming soon" to "coming next year" to a specific month. Fixing a date publicly before development is complete risks having to revise it repeatedly, which damages the trust the pre-launch activity was designed to build and wastes the spend used to create anticipation in the first place. The content itself should do [emotional work. Behind-the-scenes material showing the thinking](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/5-things-that-make-the-difference-between-so-so-apps-and-stellar-apps-what-your-) behind design decisions, stories about the problem the app solves told through the experience of real people who have that problem, and honest accounts of what building it has involved all produce emotional engagement that feature lists cannot. ## Front-Loading Value When You Cannot Drip-Feed It Inside the App There are situations where the app design itself prevents the gradual delivery of value that sustains new users through early stages. When we built an anonymous messaging app that required upfront registration, we faced exactly this: because we could not drip-feed value inside the product, all the messaging that would normally unfold through use had to be [front-loaded into the App Store presence instead](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/how-much-should-i-actually-spend-on-strategy-before-i-start-building). We invested heavily in out-of-app content, the App Store listing, the screenshots, the preview materials, to communicate everything about the product before users even opened it. The screenshots had to do the work that an onboarding sequence would normally handle, and the listing copy had to carry the emotional promise that the first few sessions of use would otherwise deliver. Treat your App Store listing as your first onboarding screen, not as a directory entry. Every screenshot should address a question or anxiety a potential user is holding before they download. This principle applies to pre-launch more broadly. If the product cannot speak for itself before launch, the pre-launch content has to do that emotional work. The App Store screenshots, the landing page, the social content all need to answer the question a potential user is unconsciously asking: what will this feel like, and will it feel like that for someone like me? According to [Apptentive](https://www.dogtownmedia.com/building-buzz-pre-launch-marketing-strategies-for-your-mobile-app/), apps that execute solid pre-launch marketing see substantially higher day-one retention. The mechanism behind that figure is this: users who arrive understanding what the product is and what it will feel like are not surprised by it. Their expectations were set accurately, and accurate expectations sustain engagement in a way that inflated ones cannot. ## Keeping Emotional Promises From Marketing Through to the Product Itself We worked on a mobile app in the health and wellness genetics sector where the brand's emotional promise and the product experience were completely misaligned. The packaging and online presence were luxurious and aspirational, all about transformation, becoming a better version of yourself, reaching your full potential. The app itself was cold and clinical, purely functional in its copy and design. Users had moved from aspirational marketing, through ordering a kit, doing a test, and then opening the app to see their results. The journey broke down entirely at the product touchpoint. It was a jarring experience, and the mismatch was not subtle. The emotional register shifted completely between the pre-product and in-product moments. Map the emotional tone at every pre-launch touchpoint against the emotional tone of the first three minutes inside the product. If they do not match, users will feel the discontinuity even if they cannot name it. Pre-launch excitement sets an emotional expectation. The product has to meet that expectation or the disappointment is proportional to how high the anticipation was. A brand that builds significant excitement around being warm, human, and personal, and then delivers a cold onboarding experience, has created a bigger problem than if it had built no excitement at all. The promise made before launch is a contract, and the product is where you either honour it or break it. This is why the [emotional design of the product and the pre-launch marketing](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/why-your-social-media-app-needs-more-than-just-pretty-design) campaign cannot be developed independently. The team building the launch communications needs to understand exactly what emotional experience the product delivers, and the product team needs to understand exactly what emotional promise the marketing is making. ## Using Structural Mechanics to Turn Early Users Into an Acquisition Engine Referral mechanics are a standard pre-launch tool, but most are designed as incentive programmes rather than as structural features of the product itself. Discount-based referrals, push notifications prompting social sharing, and email campaigns asking users to invite friends all treat acquisition as something separate from use. The most effective mechanics we have seen are ones where acquisition is a natural consequence of how the product works. On a travel app aimed at younger adults in their twenties and thirties, focused on group bookings, we tried several post-launch acquisition approaches. Referrals with discounts, push notifications to re-engage users, social sharing of trips, and email campaigns all moved the numbers modestly. What actually changed the trajectory was a viral loop built into the booking flow itself. When someone organised a group trip, the app prompted each individual traveller in the group to download the app for communication and to submit passport details. One person booking a trip for ten people instantly generated nine new users, each of whom could then trigger their own cohort. The acquisition happened because of the product structure, not despite it or around it. Before launch, map the [natural social moments inside your product's core use case](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-development-team-actually-needs-to-know-about-the-user-before-sprint-one). If the app is designed for group activity, shared goals, or visible progress, there is almost certainly a structural acquisition mechanic available that does not rely on incentives. The pre-launch implication is this: if your product has a structural mechanic like that available, the pre-launch period is the time to identify and design it, not to discover it is missing six months after release. ## How Timing and Context Shape Whether Anticipation Converts to Loyalty Anticipation that converts to download does not automatically convert to retention. The moment a user opens an app for the first time, they are already carrying whatever feeling the pre-launch content produced: excitement, curiosity, perhaps mild anxiety about whether the product will deliver. The app's first ten seconds need to meet that specific emotional state, not a generic new-user state. When we designed the notification timing for the concierge app, we did not use simple fixed delays like "two days after move-in." We ran focus groups and scenario research to understand how people actually behave when moving home. Someone arriving in the morning is likely to start unpacking that day. Someone arriving in the evening probably will not unpack until the next day. A single person takes longer to unpack than a household of two or three. The result was a dynamic timing system that determined when to send each notification based on arrival time and number of occupants. The notifications were not perceived as demands or warnings. Users experienced them as helpful, anticipated guidance because the timing matched where they actually were in their experience, not where a fixed schedule assumed they would be. The pre-launch parallel is direct. A user who signed up to a waitlist three months before launch is in a [different emotional state on launch day than one who signed up](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/what-a-behavioural-retrospective-looks-like-three-months-after-launch) the week before. The first communication each receives on launch day should probably be different, and the onboarding sequence that follows should account for how long they have been anticipating this moment. ## The Role of Community and Human Connection in Pre-Launch Momentum One of the most consistent findings across the projects we have worked on is that community built before launch performs very differently from an audience built before launch. An audience watches. A community participates, and participation produces ownership, which produces advocacy. During focus groups we ran for the concierge app, we included groups of people in social housing, not the target market for the product. What we found was that these participants were having meaningful, deeper conversations with each other rather than superficial ones, and that this depth was what fostered a genuine sense of community. The insight shaped our recommendation: the app should handle the transactional and mundane, maintenance requests, fire drill procedures, recycling locations, while actively encouraging deeper human conversations with the concierge and between residents. Pushing everything into the app would have replaced the thing that made the community real. The same logic applies to pre-launch communities. A Discord server, a waiting list forum, or a beta group that is managed to produce genuine conversations between members, not just between the developer and the audience, creates a different quality of connection to the product than broadcast communication does. People who have talked to others about a product before it launches feel a shared investment in its success. They arrive on launch day as participants in something they have been part of building, and that feeling sustains engagement well beyond what polished marketing content alone can produce. ## Signals That Tell You Excitement Is Real, Not Just Visible Visible excitement and real excitement produce different data. Visible excitement shows up in follower counts, post reach, and impression numbers. Real excitement shows up in behaviours that cost the person something: their time, their social credibility, or their attention over an extended period. The signals worth tracking before launch are qualitative as much as quantitative. People asking specific questions about the product (not just reacting to posts) indicate genuine interest in whether it will work for them. Unprompted shares, where someone posts about the product without being asked or incentivised, indicate that their identity is already partially invested in it. Direct messages asking for early access indicate a level of desire that casual awareness does not produce. #### Quantitative Signals That Mean Something | Signal | What It Indicates | What It Does Not Indicate | | --- | --- | --- | | Waitlist signups | Willingness to give contact details | Intent to download or pay | | Unprompted shares | Identity investment in the product | Content quality alone | | Specific product questions | Personal relevance being evaluated | General awareness | | Early access requests | Active desire, not passive interest | Satisfaction with what they have now | #### The Metric That Matters Most The single most reliable pre-launch signal is whether people are talking about the product to others who did not prompt them. That behaviour requires them to stake some social credibility on the product being as good as they are implying. No amount of reach or impressions data tells you whether that is happening. Listening to what people say in comments, DMs, and community spaces does. CB Insights has identified inadequate marketing planning as a factor in [29% of app failures](https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/startup-failure-reasons-top/). The useful question that figure raises is what adequate marketing planning actually looks like, and the answer is tracking the [signals that predict behaviour rather than the ones that measure visibility](https://weareaffective.com/learning-centre/not-all-data-is-created-equally-how-your-app-developers-can-determine-your-highe). ## Conclusion Pre-launch excitement that converts to loyal users is built on a consistent emotional thread that runs from the first piece of content a potential user sees through to the moment they open the app for the first time. Break that thread at any point and the excitement you built becomes a liability, because the disappointment is proportional to the anticipation. The practical priorities are clearer than the jargon around launch strategies tends to suggest. Understand the emotional state of your target user before they encounter your product. Build pre-launch content that produces the feeling the product will eventually deliver, not just an understanding of what the product does. Design structural mechanics that make acquisition a natural consequence of use. Set timing based on where users actually are emotionally, not where a fixed schedule assumes they will be. And track signals that indicate real desire, not just visible awareness. The genetics app we worked on had luxury marketing and a clinical product. The travel app found its real growth not in referral schemes but in the logic of how group travel works. The concierge app built loyalty through notifications that arrived when people actually needed them, not on a schedule that suited the product team. In each case, the insight that changed the outcome was about emotional state, not about channel or budget. Pre-launch is your best opportunity to build the right expectations before the product has to meet them. Use it to create genuine anticipation, deliver on the promise the moment someone opens the app, and the work you do before launch will sustain you well after it. [Let's talk about your app launch strategy](https://weareaffective.com/get-started). ## Frequently Asked Questions What is the difference between awareness and anticipation in app marketing? Awareness simply means someone has seen your content and registered that something is coming. Anticipation goes further, making a person feel that they will personally miss out if they do not act, which is what actually drives sign-ups and launch day conversions. Why do so many pre-launch campaigns fail to convert sign-ups into active users? Most pre-launch efforts generate noise rather than genuine anticipation, producing impressions that are seen and quickly forgotten. On launch day, the audience has no felt connection to the product, so the conversion from waitlist to active user falls short of expectations. Is a large budget necessary to build excitement before an app launches? No, budget is rarely the deciding factor in whether a pre-launch generates real excitement. The difference comes down to whether the team understands the psychological mechanisms that produce anticipation, which can be applied without significant spending. Why is describing an app's features not enough to generate desire? Rational understanding of what a product does is entirely separate from the emotional pull to want it. A potential user can fully grasp a feature list and still feel nothing that compels them to sign up or show up on launch day. What psychological mechanisms actually produce genuine excitement for an app? The article points to three core mechanisms: identity resonance, scarcity, and social belonging. When people feel that an app is made for someone like them, that access may be limited, and that others they identify with are involved, genuine anticipation follows. What is the problem with treating pre-launch marketing as purely a channel strategy? Focusing on channels such as social media, press coverage, or email lists only answers where to put content, not what that content needs to do to a person emotionally. Without an understanding of the emotional sequence you need to create, even well-distributed content produces no felt response. How can a developer tell whether their pre-launch content is building genuine anticipation or just noise? Noise produces surface metrics like reach and follower growth but leaves no lasting impression between touchpoints. Genuine anticipation means the audience carries an active awareness that something meaningful is coming, and that feeling persists until launch. Should pre-launch activity begin before any code has been written? The article notes that some apps have built long waitlists before a single line of code was written, suggesting that pre-launch momentum does not depend on having a finished product. 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