I think SaaS marketers tend to make too much out of product launches—they represent a one-time burst of attention. What you're really after is driving sustainable use of your product. Nonetheless, they represent an opportunity to make a splash.

We just finished what was probably the biggest product launch we've ever had—announcing Outseta's new Webflow App. The strategy here was simple—double down on what's working. More customers have integrated Outseta with Webflow than any other technology. Here's a quick rundown of some of the key elements of this launch as well as some interesting findings—starting with our launch video.

This is the announcement post on our website for the new app. In general we used the video above on our social channels to get attention, then drove people back to this post. It's much more focused on showing the "how" of working with the app—it contains a bunch of detailed tutorial videos. We also coordinated a Product Hunt launch for the app.

When launching something like this I don't worry about working with a well known "hunter" or trying to be one of the top products of the day. While that can drive some exposure, it rarely drives much revenue. And this app being Webflow specific, I knew it wouldn't have broad enough appeal to work it's way into a top position. Much of the value that I see in Product Hunt is you get a really high quality backlink to your site—that was really the primary motivation in this case.

I posted the same social media post to both Linkedin and Twitter—which proved once again that the reach and engagement on Linkedin tends to be stronger (212 likes versus 82 as of this writing). But perhaps the biggest learning was simply to involve your partners early and often when launching a product like this. I literally cornered Webflow's COO and CTO at WebflowConf to tell them about what we were building (sorry Linda and Alan). They connected me with the right team members internally who helped us push our new app.

We were highlighted in a prominent position on their website, pushed on their social channels, and highlighted in a newsletter as well. Given Webflow has an audience far larger than us, getting their team involved and excited was the highest impact thing that we did. In the past I've been guilty of shying away from larger partners, worried that they wouldn't care about my little start-up. You need to give them reason to care, but I found that doing so also gives you motivation to level up whatever it is that you're doing. Here's our listing for the new app in the Webflow Apps marketplace. Finally, here's the actual Trello board checklist that we used to coordinate all of the items related to this launch. It should give you a sense of what all the moving parts looked like for a product launch of this size.

‍