Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything

08/31/16 • 11 min

Founder’s Journey: Building a Startup from the Ground Up

https://baremetrics.com/blog/product-launch-sequence

Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything

If you launch something on the internet and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? I know. Deep. But seriously, how do you launch/release/announce/publish something and make sure people do in fact hear?

Here at Baremetrics we have a launch sequence that we use variations of for basically anything we put out: articles, products, features, news...anything. It’s a repeatable set of steps done over 7 days and one we’ve been optimizing over the past couple of years and one you can likely copy and use for your own company! Who doesn’t like copying?!?!

Not all of these items will be applicable to everything you put out (you wouldn’t do a press release for a new blog post).

Note: I’ll be using the words launch, release, publish and announce interchangeably here but ultimately I’m referring to “getting something out there”.

Setting a launch date

Whether you’re publishing a new article or releasing a major new feature, you need to give yourself a little lead time to get your ducks in a row.

Usually, one week out is sufficient. If it’s something just absolutely huge (initial product launch, for instance), then two or three weeks would be more appropriate.

Now, for the 7 day launch sequence!

Day 7

Write out the story you’re telling

When it comes to features and products, everything you do needs a story behind it. The mechanics of the thing you’re releasing aren’t the story...the problem you’re solving is where things get interesting.

What you write for this isn’t necessarily something you’ll publish directly, but it helps focus how you present things, the copy you use on landing pages, what you pitch to PR folks, etc.

Initial press outreach

Not all things you put out will warrant a PR push, but if you can put a compelling spin on what you’re doing, getting some press coverage can go a long way.

There’s not really any magic sauce for getting the press to cover you. So much of what does/doesn’t get covered boils down to the whims of the reporter and what else is in the current news cycle. Your best bet is to just cast the net wide and hope for some bites.

Some tips for doing press outreach:

Email journalists who’ve covered similar topics to what you’re announcing before as that means they’ve got at least some interest in what you’re doing.
Make the subject line informative and compelling. Being spammy or vague won’t get you anywhere.
In your first line reference their writing on the topic that you think is tangentially related to what you’re doing so it’s clear you’re not just blanket-emailing everyone.
Keep the email to 4-5 sentences and mention when you’re launching and if there’s an embargo on the announcement. People need deadlines and including a hard date/time helps them prioritize your email.

Partnership outreach

Some of the things you may launch likely involve another company in some form or fashion. Start coordinating announcements or guest posts now.

For example, when we launched Open Startups, I worked with our pals at Buffer to do a guest blog post for them, which gave Open Startups a huge boost and got it out in front of a much larger audience.

When we launched our Slack App, we worked with the fine folks at Slack to be a featured app in their directory.

If what you’re launching makes use of another company’s technology, they’ll likely want to help you promote it. Case Studies are a great format for this and something we did with Clearbit.

Day 6

Create launch video

Video is a great format to show off a new feature and give a bit of backstory on why you created it. We try to create short demo videos for both landing pages and general sharing for any major feature we release.

You can see some examples videos here...

These videos don’t need to be complex or overly polished...the more human they are, the better.

Day 5

Create a landing page

When you’re launching a new feature, having a direct landing page is crucial. It allows you to reference a feature from the perspective of “solution to a problem”.

It’s also the perfect segue to a call-to-action (such as st...

https://baremetrics.com/blog/product-launch-sequence

Our 7 day launch sequence for announcing anything

Not all of these items will be applicable to everything you put out (you wouldn’t do a press release for a new blog post).

Note: I’ll be using the words launch, release, publish and announce interchangeably here but ultimately I’m referring to “getting something out there”.

Setting a launch date

Whether you’re publishing a new article or releasing a major new feature, you need to give yourself a little lead time to get your ducks in a row.

Usually, one week out is sufficient. If it’s something just absolutely huge (initial product launch, for instance), then two or three weeks would be more appropriate.

Now, for the 7 day launch sequence!

Day 7

Write out the story you’re telling

What you write for this isn’t necessarily something you’ll publish directly, but it helps focus how you present things, the copy you use on landing pages, what you pitch to PR folks, etc.

Initial press outreach

Not all things you put out will warrant a PR push, but if you can put a compelling spin on what you’re doing, getting some press coverage can go a long way.

Some tips for doing press outreach:

Email journalists who’ve covered similar topics to what you’re announcing before as that means they’ve got at least some interest in what you’re doing.
Make the subject line informative and compelling. Being spammy or vague won’t get you anywhere.
In your first line reference their writing on the topic that you think is tangentially related to what you’re doing so it’s clear you’re not just blanket-emailing everyone.
Keep the email to 4-5 sentences and mention when you’re launching and if there’s an embargo on the announcement. People need deadlines and including a hard date/time helps them prioritize your email.

Partnership outreach

Some of the things you may launch likely involve another company in some form or fashion. Start coordinating announcements or guest posts now.

When we launched our Slack App, we worked with the fine folks at Slack to be a featured app in their directory.

If what you’re launching makes use of another company’s technology, they’ll likely want to help you promote it. Case Studies are a great format for this and something we did with Clearbit.

Day 6

Create launch video

You can see some examples videos here...

These videos don’t need to be complex or overly polished...the more human they are, the better.

Day 5

Create a landing page

When you’re launching a new feature, having a direct landing page is crucial. It allows you to reference a feature from the perspective of “solution to a problem”.

It’s also the perfect segue to a call-to-action (such as st...

Previous Episode

How we increased annual upgrades by 30%

When you’re building a business based on recurring revenue, what you want is predictability. The “recurring” part has a pretty strong measure of that, but getting more of that recurring payment upfront reduces churn and improves cashflow, letting you spend more money now to acquire customers faster.

Most companies are very low-touch with annual plans. It’s offered as an option on pricing pages, and that’s usually where it’s left. But you can drastically improve conversions to annual plans by having a slightly higher touch option.

What we see a lot of companies do is a once-a-year email push in the fourth quarter to try and squeeze out a single influx of cash. We took this a step further and started sending out emails within a few months of a company signing up.

This worked relatively well, getting us $14,000 in 7 days. But we found the emails didn’t the response rate and, more importantly, the conversion rates that we believed we could be getting.

So, we did a little experiment.

A better way to converse with customers

We’ve increasingly been moving the ways that way converse with our active customers out of email and in to in-app messages (courtesy of our pals at Intercom). We’ve found those message get a much higher response rate and the quality of the response is generally higher.

We decided it’d be worth testing moving these annual upsells to in-app messages as well.

It’s the same offer to the same people, just in a different format.

The result? We saw a 30% increase to annual plans.

Hot dog! So, why?

What we’ve learned as we transition a lot of customer interactions to in-app messages is that context matters. And I believe that applies strongly here.

With an in-app message, the annual offer is present right smack in the middle of the user soaking up the value they get from Baremetrics.

How context changes sentiment

When a message is presenting in a value context, it changes the customer’s sentiment towards the action requested.

With an in-app message:

User logs in to Baremetrics
User looks through metrics, growth, breakouts, trends, etc.
User has warm fuzzies from all the insights they’re getting
User presented with offer to keep getting warm fuzzies for 25% off
User says “heck yeah!”

With email:

User, potentially in the middle of some eye-gouging meeting or worn out at the end of a really long day, desperately wanting their inbox to be zero, receives an email asking for money
User scoffs and hits “delete”.
The end.

The “cloud of value” they’re surrounded with while inside Baremetrics does not exist in their inbox. It’s also more work to take advantage of the offer and feels weird to reply to an email to upgrade to something (in many cases spending thousands of dollars).

So, whether it’s annual upsells, feedback or feature education, try changing the context of the message to see if the relevant conversion rates are improved. For us, it’s been a consistent improvement for all types of messaging.

What are some ways you’ve improved annual upsell conversions?

Next Episode

That new feature will not save your business

https://baremetrics.com/blog/new-features-will-not-save-your-business

As a founder, you ooze optimism. It’s a necessary coping mechanism to deal with the volatile up’s and down’s of creating something out of nothing. But that becomes problematic when you’re still finding product/market fit as it makes you believe that next feature will be the feature that solves all of your product’s problems. It won’t.

Andrew Chen calls this the Next Feature Fallacy.

Above is a chart of our Monthly Recurring Revenue since the beginning of Baremetrics’ existence nearly three years ago along with annotations of each feature release. I’ve overlaid vertical lines so you can see the exact points where those annotations correlate with the graph...which is almost meaningless because, as you see, those lines never directly correlate to a change in the graph.

Features don’t grow businesses. Solutions grow businesses.

If you throw a trend line over the graph, it’s just the most boring thing you’ve ever seen. Revenue continues to increase month-over-month, but there’s no single point where “everything changed”.

That’s not to say features don’t matter, but progress isn’t made by shipping features, it’s made by solving problems. Like I said, solutions grow businesses, and ultimately solutions are the sum of all parts: features, marketing, onboarding, customer support...the whole bag.

If you’re a designer or developer by trade, it’s easy to think that spending a couple of hours/days/weeks building something will be what turns your business around. It’s dangerous because it feels like progress. You’re doing something, right? But you’re likely ignoring the core issues if you’re just cranking out feature after feature while neglecting other parts of your business.

Business is a never-ending process of tweaking hundreds of knobs. Many of the “wins” you’ll see will come from a random combination of knob-tweaking that you just stumble upon. Don’t just tweak “product” knobs. Make adjustments across every facet of your business so the entire customer experience is improved. That’s when you’ll find long term, sustained growth.