Defining Launch

When building Arcade, we would always say "when we launch" as a timestamp in our business. It wasn't until a few months had passed that we realized none of us were thinking of the same thing when we said that. In each of our heads, launch meant something different. This made important conversations more difficult than they had to be and made things unclear. After defining what our launch would look like, the framing of our conversations became much clearer.

I wrote about this in more detail here. (opens in a new tab)

Our First Launch

This is our "launch":

• Product is good enough where it is (functional, secure)
• Send out a Tweet from MikeCarbone personal account acknowledging the public's access to the platform
• Send out a Tweet from Interweave account saying the same thing
• Share to Reddit
• Share to HackerNews
• Share on ProductHunt

Each of those will include text and maybe some media (images and/or videos). With those methods, word should be amplified enough. That's it for first-go. That's our launch.

Besides Minimum Viable Product (MVP) features (admittedly a little more than required to meet my own satisfaction), these are tasks still required to complete before launching:

• Up-to-date documentation
• Meta information is functioning correctly
• Prepare marketing statements and media

Important disclaimers:

• We're still in Beta, use at your own risk
• Pricing will fluctuate
• Things will change

Incremental Launching

This is just our first launch. It doesn't have to be some epic red-carpet rollout. Instead, it's going to be nice to get the first one out of the way so we can start building a habit of this.

At a ProductHunt meetup in 2021, Loom Founder Shahed Khan (opens in a new tab) told a story about how he launched on ProductHunt many times during the course of building Loom. He said it was important for gathering feedback, building community trust, and obtaining "allies" of Loom as the product grew.

I really like this mindset and will be adopting it. We'll try to launch as frequently as possible, whenever a product update is significant enough to warrant one.

Startups in general should be coming from a position of consistently launching their products.

• Shahed Khan (opens in a new tab), Founder of Loom

Calming Expectations

It's really easy to hype yourself up about a launch; expectations are high and your dreams of an instant-classic unicorn SaaS are hard to tame. Months or maybe years of work are finally being shared with the world. It's exciting, it's scary, and it can be extremely demotivating. This time around, I'm making it a habit to create a list of negations-- the opposite of affirmations. This is to calm expectations and make sure progress continues after launch. Framing mindset this way will help.

Negations:

• This will probably not blow up
• Most people won't care
• I will make zero dollars on day one

Future Launches

Future launches will take the same form, posting on the media listed above. We'll build out a changelog to share these changes easily.