If you’re launching a new site, product or service, then there’s a huge benefit to building hype and buzz before you launch. It’s something that Apple does extremely well, but you don’t need to be a huge company to be able to pull it off.

Building a prelaunch page – a simple page that describes your soon-to-be-launching product, along with an email signup form – is one of the techniques that Eric Ries famously proposes in The Lean Startup and it’s a great way of building an email list of people who will be interested in your new product. All of this helps to give you a huge boost when you actually launch, as you get to email your prospective customers on the launch day itself, and in the run-up to launch day you can help to further build hype by keeping people who have signed up updated with news on how the development is going.