Product Launch Planning

"Say you’re asking ChatGPT to write an announcement for a new feature. You want to make sure the phrasing is attention-grabbing and factual but that the message is also authentic to your product and customer base. Naively asking ChatGPT to do the task without giving it any real direction will likely result in a generic response that leans too heavily on emojis and over-enthusiastic corporate speak."

"Here’s the hard truth: No one cares about your new product. As Marc Andreessen said, “everyone’s time is already allocated.”"

"We reached out to board members of the homeowners association, and they were more than willing to hear us out. After an initial conversation, they invited us to present the concept to more residents at their next board meeting."

"The GACCS framework (Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders) keeps teams from doing busywork, drives cross-team alignment, and helps marketers produce more work that your prospects and customers—and coworkers—love. In short, it helps stop marketing work from being a waste of time."

"Product Hunt is one of the most effective ways to get early users for a product. It’s free, available to everyone, and if you can pull off a great launch, Product Hunt can change your startup’s growth trajectory."

"With such a large investment of time and team hours, you need to ask yourself—are there better ways you could be using your time? Especially if you’re looking for a sustained increase in signups or launching your product for the first time, paid ad campaigns are often a more efficient way to test initial messaging or scale your marketing efforts sustainably."

"First things first—set a conversion goal for your product. It’s great to aim for the top spot on Product Hunt, but what actually matters are your business KPIs: website visits, new signups, and trial conversions to paid."

"Imagine throwing a party and not telling anyone until the day of. That’s what it’s like to launch on Product Hunt without warming up your audience. Start building buzz 30 days in advance of your planned launch."

"One of the most overlooked strategies is playing the time-zone game to your advantage. Spreading your votes throughout the day is crucial, as is launching at 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time. Product Hunt’s algorithm favors products that maintain a steady stream of engagement."

"If your supporters have not signed up to Product Hunt in advance and they create brand-new accounts on launch day to upvote, there is a high likelihood that these votes end up being removed by the Product Hunt algorithm."

"The night we launched, more than half of the student body joined in just the first three hours. For our first 17 schools, we repeated this process of launching white-labeled apps, each with the school’s letter as its icon, making the app more recognizable and reducing friction to download on the App Store."

"The networked product should be launched in its simplest possible form—not fully featured—so that it has a dead simple value proposition. The target should be on building a tiny, atomic network—the smallest that could possibly make sense—and focus on building density, ignoring the objection of “market size.”"

"If you’ve launched and have very little traction, it’s worse than being pre-launch, because it shows the market/value prop is already demonstrably weak. This is why no data is better than bad/small data."

"When we officially launched Figma, we limited ourselves to a core set of features that felt polished and well-designed, instead of cramming in features. We didn’t have components, styles, or even multiplayer in that core set of features."