I have moved my launch date twice — is there ever a good reason to delay, or is it always fear?

The waitlist decay is the cost you are not counting. Mine opened at 61 percent for people who had signed up within the last month, 34 percent for two to three months, and under 20 percent for anyone older than four months, and the click rates fell off harder than the opens did. Your February signups are, functionally, gone. If you delay again, assume you are launching to about half the list you think you have, and start mailing them something monthly right now so the rest do not go the same way.

In my experience there are exactly two delays that pay for themselves. One, you cannot take money safely or you would be shipping something that loses customer data, because those are the failures you cannot apologise your way out of. Two, something outside your control has a date attached, like an app store review or a partner announcement, and going early wastes it. Everything else, including onboarding roughness, edge cases at two percent, and logos, is a thing you fix in the first fortnight after launch with real users telling you which order to fix them in. Your billing edge case at one in fifty is a support email, not a delay.

I launched on time with billing that double charged four people in the first week, which cost me two refunds, one very polite public complaint, and about ten hours of my life, and I still think it was the right call. What it taught me is that shipping broken is survivable when the breakage is visible and reversible, and it is not survivable when the breakage is silent. Ask which kind of broken you have.

I delayed six weeks and it was unambiguously right, so the answer is not always fear. We found during a beta that our data export produced files a specific and popular spreadsheet tool would not open, and half our early users would have hit it in week one. That is not polish, that is the product failing at the thing it promised. The test I use now: would a normal user hit this in their first session, and would it make them not come back. If yes to both, delay. If no to either, ship.

Pick a date, tell the list, and let the date be the constraint that decides what gets built. The logo has never once been the reason.