How to launch your new product
Two case studies - Growth School and Readwise - plus what to learn from them
In the last essay of August, I wrote about how we built and launched Atoms, Accel’s reimagining of pre-seed investing in India. Even as I wrote it, I realised I wanted to spend more time on this most important of tactics: the product launch.
So I picked two launches from last week that are worth thinking about.
First, Vaibhav Sisinty’s launch of Growth School.
Vaibhav is someone we are all familiar with. His relentless brand building on LinkedIn and non-stop hustle over the past couple of years have won him an audience. And it is this audience that he is now going to monetise with his new cohort based learning startup.
In the announcement on Twitter and LinkedIn, he says that he focused on building the business before he worked on the logo, the website, and so on. I would go one step further. My contention is that he had finished the marketing part of his startup before he even thought of it.
I’d written, on this exact day last year (wow!?), that the founder's personal brand is a marketing channel. You can see that in action here. Vaibhav’s work with his Linkedin marketing courses means that he has a captive audience for his startup already, and he’s off to the races.
Sure, you may ask, Vaibhav is an influencer, how can I with my boring SaaS startup have that kind of reach? Very good question. That is exactly why you have to start marketing as early as you can, even before launch like Rocketlane did.
There will still be folks who are sceptical, who think they should build the product first, then think about marketing and launch activities. Sure, do that, don’t invest time in building a brand and an audience. You will just have to do a lot of heavy lifting to get to PMF after launch. If that’s fine with you, go ahead, do it the hard way.
But remember, Vaibhav’s launch was successful because he had already done all the hard work. You can do that too. Lesson: Start marketing early, invest in building a brand early, and use that to create an audience for your startup, so you can sell the product to them later.
Second, Readwise’s launch of its new reading app.
Readwise is a 'second brain' tool that keeps all your thoughts, pointers, highlights and general intellectual dump organised. A huge part of Readwise is importing all your notes and highlights from other tools like Twitter, Kindle, Notion, and so on. So logically it makes sense to build their own reading app. Which they now have.
With the founder writing a 5000 word essay on why they did so.
This is brilliant, for two reasons. One, in that it allows him, the founder, to explain the product thinking and positioning behind the build and launch, which more people will pay attention to; and second, in that it is exactly the marketing that will appeal to the kind of people this tool is built for. Because who reads 5000 word essays on product building? People who’d use a product like Readwise, of course.
Readwise is already a revenue generating, popular tool, but launches like this help it stay in the zeitgeist, and keep screaming its value proposition to the target audience. A win in every way.
But again, the most important point here is of founder generated content. Readwise’s reader launch got the traction it has because the founder launched it, taking the time out to write 5000 words. That’s a signal that says 'this is important', and it scores. If it was just a marketing message saying 'hey, we launched a reader, check it out', no one would pay attention.
A rather important corollary to the lessons from Growth School and Readwise is the importance of social media. Vaibhav built his brand on social, which gave him an audience, which he has now tapped for Growth School. Literally no media outlet covered Readwise’s little product launch, but it has made an impact on the audience it wanted, simply because of social.
This is why I’ve held for some time now that every startup needs to hire a social media manager.