Launch Marketing

"For getting awareness, we've mainly been posting what we've shipped on social media, that's how people know about us."

"For early stage startups, we're almost always running the launch announcement as an exclusive, which means you give the news to a single outlet. And they're the only ones who get to write about it."

"Don't do a straight funding announcement. A lot of founders raise money and they're like, cool, let's announce. It's like, no, we'll use that funding announcement as a news hook to tell a larger story and a larger story might be your products available. You have reference customers, you have momentum."

"Don't sleep on local press. If you have a local business or a local story or local customers... We turned all of our customers into heroes and went after local press."

"I'm a big believer in comms. ... I think that there are very few and far between incredible megaphones for what it is that you or your company is doing where you get to reach such a breadth of people with that stamp of credibility and notice. How do you get somebody to say, 'Hey, this is really something you should pay attention to.'?"

"With satellite imagery, it honestly wasn't the most important part of Google Maps, but it was the sizzle to the steak and it created... a viral moment."

"Biz [Stone] was really focused on getting celebrities and public figures onto Twitter... we were exclusively focused on polishing the product... we totally lost for no reason related to product at all."

"I think because product-led growth became very popular... if PLG means that you aren't actually engaging with the buyer of your software, you're not going to grow."

"There's the knowing something's coming and then there's the knowing what to do with it. You can use just some status keeping thing to say, 'This is coming in Q4'... but it's what to do with it and how to position it and how to talk about it and all the things that was missing from it."

"Treating content is a part of the development lifecycle process. You really want to treat it as a part of definition of done. When you think about product-led growth... it's all about creating that experience and keeps people in and helps them upgrade."

"launching with two or three episodes, either all at once or in a week is a really valuable strategy... the ranking charts are all driven by different variables than you would imagine. They're driven a lot by momentum of new subscribers."

"What if you did that as a software company? What if you launched a thing... the way Hollywood launches a movie? ... the idea of a lightning strike is, if you are in our target audience for that day or that two days, we are going to be all over you. ... I'd rather matter for one week a year than be irrelevant for the rest of the year."

"The way I think about it now is this bottoms-up motion, that really is focused on ICs... they love you so much that they're willing to put their social capital and themselves in the line and spread the product throughout whatever their communities are. And the one that's connected the most to revenue is companies."

"We wanted to see was that designers were excited when they saw the tool... I remember they would take the laptop out of Dylan's hands when he would start showing it because they wanted to play with it. And to me, when I started seeing designers do that... that kind of emotion, no reaction of wanting to play with it in these demos was really what gave me confidence that we were ready to launch."

"We're already seeing some really exciting use cases, virtual production for movies... robotic simulation... a psychologist team called us to use Marble to do psychology research. It turned out some of the psychiatric patients they study, they need to understand how their brain respond to different immersive things... Marble is a really almost instantaneous way of getting so many of these experimental environments into their hands."

"When we pitch a funding story, we make it very clear, 'Hey, we're reaching out with a startup launch or funding. We're offering this to you as an exclusive, meaning we're not going to pitch anyone else if you take the story. Here's the amount that's raised, here's the space that... Here's the space they're in and here are the investors.'"

"I highly recommend not having a firm date that you think you need to announce something and going instead with when a reporter is able to cover your story... if you can optimize for the reporter over the timing, you're going to see such a better outcome."

"I would say before an announcement happens, you probably want to kick off six weeks in advance. So when we start with the company, it's like we're working on the blog, we're doing a media training, we're doing the media outreach, we're getting quotes from investors."

"This is a marketing brief that I recommend you do before you make anything big in marketing or do any big projects. And it's just what are the goals? What's the audience? What's the creative or unique end goal? What's this thing? I guess what's going to make it different and stand out from other companies? The second C is the channels or how this is going to be distributed. How are you going to get the word out about this? Deep thinking there. And then the last few are the stakeholders."

"The Crossing the Chasm model is, 'Can you create a viable repeatable business?' And in order to do that, you need to have an ecosystem of partners work with you in order to consolidate your position. Well, why would an ecosystem work with some startup that nobody's ever heard of? The answer would be if you had consolidated a market segment where you were number one."

"In the early market, you know you're there because first of all, the story is the technology... In the bowling alley one then the playbook is, 'No, where's the problem?'... In the tornado... this is when you do want sales coverage, and you do want to go broad."

"We found that just translating it with AI was able to get performance almost as good as the original, in the original language. So this is going to fly to the entire market."

"But one of the other things that you can be doing for your marketing and sales teams is separating your hard launch from your soft launch. So what you should be doing is basically saying your developers are able to launch something on a particular date and it's the date that's convenient for them... When this new thing comes out, that's a soft launch. As soon as that soft launch is out, great, let's kick off this launch meeting with launch steps."

"Sometimes the point of it is not to reach the people who are reading it at all... Maybe what it really is is to tweet it and then put some money behind promoting that tweet because then you can target that you got coverage to the people who you want to notice you got coverage. And I see a lot of people do that. They'll take articles that we ran on Entrepreneur and they'll basically turn them into advertisements."

"We were in this private beta stage for almost a year... We invited people based on... We invited more smaller companies using the tools we currently supported. And then also I was trying to see who is more interested versus just, I don't know, I just want to try it out type of people."

"With our announcement, we wrote it more direct or authentic to us like, 'This is what we're going to do and this is why, and these are some of the things we're going to do.' On a Twitter, we did the same thing. All of us founders, we wrote our own reasons why we're doing this, and I think it was just much more... I think people like us could resonate more with it."

"We tried to get it all at once. It was a new blockchain. It was a basket of currencies originally. It was integration into WhatsApp and Messenger... I think the whole world kind of went like, 'Oh my God, that's a lot of change at once.' ... introduced the change a little bit more gently, maybe still gotten to that same outcome, but fewer new things at once."

"If you want to spread something you go out in concentric circles starting from your own desk. So you need to get first really clear with yourself about what your message is and just get really crisp with it... And then the next circle is going to be your co-founders, your executives, your employees, your investors, you go to your power users, and you go out from there, and it has to be in that sequence."

"Give it away for free to the right people. If you can choose the people who are going to love it, look at the Venn diagram of people who are going to be obsessed with this product. And people who have a large following among the other people that you want to get to, whoever falls into that sliver of the Venn diagram shower them with free product."

"I'm throwing everything against the wall. I'm looking at what's going to stick. I am looking to try to find the winning tactic and turn it into a winning strategy."

"We hired a bunch of actors. They were doing this event in San Francisco... we got some picket signs at Home Depot and made some signs that said, 'The end of software is near,'... We were running a protest outside of Siebel... we hit a button, and we have other actors in a van who come out, and they are staging themselves as news crew. So they are like KNMS, K No More Software, and we're like... They're interviewing the protesters."

"I have Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson who are two friends of mine helping me. So they said, 'We'll cut ads for you.'... I'm running aggressive marketing against Microsoft because they have really a terrible product, Copilot, that I have to position against and market against."

"Product ops will take on a lot of the coordination of those types of things... making sure that go-to-market process is consistent across the organization so that it's not like... everybody's reinventing the wheel and somebody on a go-to-market team has to figure out how to go-to-market differently with a different product team."

"I think that hype as well is really tied to emotion. So to the extent that a person using a product can feel like, 'Oh, this thing that is built in the product was built for me not to advance the company's goals or anything like that, but to make me feel special, to make me feel happy.'"

"With marketing and communication with customers, you basically have a limited amount of opportunities to do so... If you miss one of those opportunities, you don't get it back again. You can't time travel back and say like, 'Okay, actually, let's redo first quarter and say this message that we wish we could have gotten into the field.'"

"I think a lot of founders separate marketing and product growth... but they're both the same. They both should be treated as the same. If you're targeting a community... you need to build marketing that shows imagery of that community... then when you get in the app, you have to be able to join that community."

"I would say at least 10 different ad creatives will be ideal per week and the more the better."

"A broader targeting approach is actually recommended at the very early stage... I can see for the first two years in the business... they want to do a very small niche targeting on the platform because you're limiting yourself."

"Launch sometimes doesn't help with that, but there are many other reasons why you might wanna launch. So, customer acquisition one, to get the word out. Another can be recruiting. So, by, you know, sharing your story, getting people excited, it might make it easier to recruit and get people excited about, you know, what you're building. Another is fundraising. Sometimes it can create momentum, you know, as- as other investors, they do read the news and they know that, you know, when this company is more public, they're might be more heat around it- a particular deal. Feedback is one. Um, the feedback from users, feedback just serendipitously and- and sort of another one is partnership."

"Some of the things that I've noticed that make a big difference is we've already talked about the tagline copy, that goes to, not only the post, but also the maker. Usually people tend to add like some introduction, some context. Uh, generally a lot of people will, they- they manufacture PR speak there too, and so speaking like a human, I think, is important. Also keeping it a little brief... another big one is the gallery is- is often the first thing that someone is gonna see once they land on the page. And so, just naturally our eyes gravitate towards visuals. And some of the most interesting presentations I've seen is people use the gallery almost like a slideshow, um, like telling a story, where each slide is- is communicating like a different- well, a story of some sort."

"PR is not going to get you leads or users... What it is good for is credibility... hiring or maybe improving the response rate for your cold outbound. Those are the two that I think make the most sense, because in both cases they have a different distribution mechanism."

"Instead you can have not just one big launch but a series of launches that allow you to stay top of mind, to create momentum with your users, and to show up in lots of different places because audiences respond to novelty."