How long before launching should I prepare?

The parts that matter, the concept, the image, the description and a plan for the first hour, take an afternoon. What doesn't fit in an afternoon is building an audience, which is why creators who already have one launch with an advantage no checklist replaces.

Does the checklist change if I have no community?

Same items, different weighting. Without a community, distribution becomes the whole problem, because nobody arrives on their own. Everything on the page still has to be right, it just gets seen by fewer people unless you do something about it.

Can I fix things after minting?

Some of it. Name, ticker and image are permanent, which is exactly why they sit at the top of this list. Almost everything else, including how much activity your coin sees, is still open after launch.

The Pump.fun launch checklist, in priority order

Most Pump.fun launches fail in the first hour, and most of the reasons were decided before anyone pressed mint. This checklist runs in order of impact, not in the order the interface asks you for things.

Before you mint: what you can't change later

Name and ticker. Permanent. A ticker that's hard to read, easy to confuse with something existing, or impossible to search is a handicap you carry forever. Say it out loud. Having to spell it means pick another one.

The image. It's the only thing most people will ever look at, at 64 pixels, in a feed scrolling past at speed. Shrink it down and check. Unreadable there means unreadable where it matters.

The concept. Not the story, the reason the coin exists at all. A launch with no reason beyond the mint itself doesn't get rescued by execution, and this is the one item where the right call is sometimes "don't launch this one".

Before you mint: what decides the first hour

Someone lands on your page from a feed and gives it maybe 4 seconds. Your description has to answer what this is and why now. A blank description reads as abandoned, and so does a socials row pointing at empty accounts.

How much you take at launch is visible to everyone, permanently. Too little and the curve doesn't move at all. Too much and every holder who checks distribution sees one address holding a large share of supply, which is the fastest way to lose the people you just attracted.

Launching into dead hours means the same activity buys less attention, because fewer people are browsing. That isn't superstition, it's arithmetic about who's awake.

And decide before you mint what happens in the first 60 minutes. Afterwards is too late, because by then the loop below has already closed.

The loop that kills most launches

Worth understanding the specific failure, because it explains why this checklist is weighted the way it is:

The coin mints with zero trades
Feeds rank on activity, so a coin with no activity isn't ranked
Unranked coins don't get browsed
Unbrowsed coins get no trades

Four steps, closed inside 10 minutes. How long do you think you have? Less than you planned for. The bonding curve guide goes deeper, but the practical consequence for a checklist is blunt: everything about your coin can be right and it still goes nowhere, because nobody ever saw it.

After you mint: what to watch

Trade count in the first 10 minutes tells you whether the loop closed. Zero or single digits means it did. Dozens with no price movement means something else entirely, which is that people arrived and passed.

Unique wallets tells you whether you have a crowd or 2 interested people. Ranking surfaces weight distinct participants heavily, so this number matters more than it looks.

Curve progress direction tells you which problem you have. Flat is stalled. Falling means early buyers took profit, which is different and generally healthier, because it means buyers existed.

Your comment section tells you what arrivals see. Traffic landing on a page with a moving chart and silence everywhere else mostly leaves again.

The distribution question

Here's where most checklists stop and where the real difficulty starts.

Everything above is about being ready. None of it is about being seen. Feeds read volume, trade count, unique wallets and recency, and how those boards work isn't a mystery. A coin producing none of those inputs gets ranked by nothing, and the quality of your image becomes irrelevant.

Creators solve this three ways. They bring a community, they get lucky, or they create the activity deliberately. That third option is what a volume campaign does, and the honest framing is that it buys exposure rather than demand. What happens after people arrive is still decided by everything else on this list.

The condensed version

Those last 2 are the ones people skip, and they're the 2 that decide whether the other 8 ever get looked at.

If your plan for them is a campaign, the console prices one against a specific volume, wallet count and window before anything gets signed.