A soft launch releases the product quietly to a limited audience — a region, a waitlist segment, a hand-picked cohort — before any public push. The product is real and live; the spotlight just isn't on yet.
The first version always has unknowns a launch crowd would find all at once. A soft launch finds them at survivable scale.
Define what graduates the product to a public launch — metric thresholds, not vibes — and keep the soft cohort small enough that every failure is a conversation, not a support queue.
Practical answers
Two to six weeks is common: long enough for a retention read on the first cohorts, short enough to keep momentum.
A beta still expects rough edges and recruits testers; a soft launch is the finished v1 at reduced volume. Beta tests the product, soft launch rehearses the business.
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