Bringing your startup out of stealth can feel a bit like becoming a parent. The platitude that “you’ll never be totally ready” rings true here — you could keep tinkering with your MVP in perpetuity.
But not launching is equally as scary. You’re not getting feedback from users. Your growth is glacial. Your single-digit team’s motivation is waning.
And the spotlight has only gotten harder to claim. Gone are the days when securing a TechCrunch exclusive was all you needed to make your debut in the startup world. It seems like there's a buzzy new AI startup sucking up all the oxygen every week. How do you break through the noise?
Claire Butler knows this mixture of dread and anticipation well. She worked alongside the early Figma team, including co-founders Dylan Field and Evan Wallace, to bring the design product out of its three-year stealth mode (and steward its massive community growth). After that initial debut, she went on to launch countless new products within Figma, and now as an advisor, she’s helped a number of early-stage startups step out of the shadows.
Let’s assume at this point you’ve got a shippable product, ample funding and a handful of first customers — and you’re just starting to sort out when, how and where you should emerge from stealth. Butler’s wrangled with all the questions keeping your team up at night: Do you really need press? Which features do you absolutely need to launch with? When should you do it?
Here, she lays out all the fundamentals you’ll need to nail down before launch. But heed this reminder as you craft your strategy: “The prep work can be more impactful than the launch itself,” she says. Obviously, you want your launch to win the attention of potential customers, investors and random people on LinkedIn, and her plan of action will help increase those odds. But most of the homework she assigns below is a forcing function for the crucial positioning and product decisions you need to make right now — even if your kinda-cringe tweet draft never sees the light of day.
Do the prep work to launch now so you can back into the decisions you need to make about your product and vision.
The when: Just set a date (even if it feels uncomfortably soon)
There are two states of launch readiness.
On one side, you can only really launch once. Sure, you can launch a second product or announce a fundraise later, but this is your first shot at getting your name out there. So it's tempting to wait until your product and positioning feel “perfect” — which can lead you down an endless spiral of refinement.
And on the other side, you want momentum. You feel antsy about getting your product out into the market ASAP. You crave traction and feedback from real customers, and you want to keep potential competitors from nipping at your heels.
You also feel swayed by your answer to “why now?” — your reason for launching. Are you launching a beta? Unveiling the product to users for the first time? Need some tangible proof points to start wooing prospective hires? These needs often run counter to your desire to stay in incognito mode.
Ultimately what will decide which way you teeter-totter, says Butler, is feature completeness. That means wrestling with what technically must be shipped and ready to use, and what you can say is coming down the road when you launch. “This is where you go back to your positioning statement and think to yourself, ‘What do I need to have done to launch, and what can I say is coming?’” says Butler. “That’s a decision you as a founder will have to grapple with. It’s a hard one.”
But reaching a critical mass of features is more important than absolute feature completeness for launch. Figma’s a great example of that. “We launched without multiplayer, which sounds crazy, because Figma is a collaborative online tool,” says Butler. “But it was going to take another year to finish building it.”
The multiplayer question was a contentious one for the early Figma crew — Butler remembers heated debates with her Figmates about whether it was a non-negotiable for launch. She says that this unease around your readiness should be expected.
“There’s going to be discomfort,” she says. “But someone told me once, ‘If you’re not slightly embarrassed about your feature set when you launch, you’ve waited too long.’”
As the Figma team discovered, idling in stealth can take a toll on morale. “The team was bored,” she says. “When I first joined, the office was always really quiet. They had been building for two years, just working and working. We needed momentum.”
Launching without multiplayer gave the team accountability to keep working toward that goal. “It pushed us to just get it out there without our key feature, saying multiplayer was coming and committing to that, knowing it wasn’t done.”
So how do you hop off the endless teeter-totter? Butler recommends choosing a date almost arbitrarily. “Even if you don’t know if it’ll work or not, you can always change it later,” says Butler. “You need to put a stake in the ground and have a specific date you’re working toward.”
Don’t worry about factoring seasonality into your timing calculus. “The time of year doesn’t matter,” she says. “Figma first launched in December, which is supposedly not a great time. We did other big launches days before the Fourth of July. There are pros and cons to any time of year.”
Butler also acknowledges that the world has changed since Figma launched nearly 10 years ago — and AI companies in particular no longer have the luxury of staying in a multi-year stealth mode. All the more reason to just put a date on the calendar and start working backward from there.
There’s no way you’re going to launch and think it’s perfect. You’re not going to feel totally ready no matter what.
The how: Create these three artifacts to force key decisions
With a date on the horizon, now is the time to start the prep work. Let’s assume you’ve already written up a positioning statement (read Arielle Jackson’s advice if you’re still fine-tuning) and have a rough ICP (refer to First Round Partner Meka Asonye’s playbook if you don’t). Butler says loose ideas of how you might translate that messaging into a launch won’t cut it here — actually mock up everything you’ll need to launch.
“The worst thing you can do is get stuck in a massive brainstorming file where you’re making tables about features and benefits,” she says. “Even well before you’re ready, creating launch materials will force you to sharpen your positioning.”
How long should you spend on this prep work? As much time as you have until your go-live date, she says. “Building your product is the time-gating factor. Creating these artifacts will fill the space you give it.”
Here’s what you’ll need to mock up:
The website
Your website is the manifestation of your current product marketing. Start here. “Once you have your positioning statement, do your website first,” says Butler. It forces you to decide these fundamentals:
- Brand feel and tone
- Core positioning
- Most important features
- Call to action
There’s no need to find a fancy brand agency to put together a slick website this early on, says Butler. “It can be really simple. You only need a homepage. And the second priority is the ‘about’ and ‘careers’ pages,” she says.
Even if you haven’t spent much time on, say, your brand feel and tone, making your website is a great way to stumble into what you do and don’t like. “Your website will nudge these decisions in a concrete way, instead of living in the swirl of existential uncertainty of early-stage marketing,” says Butler.
Your call-to-action button, meanwhile, will prompt discussions about how customers will be able to use your product upon launch. “Are you going to have a waitlist, or can folks sign up to use your product now? Or talk to sales? This small copy will force much larger decisions,” she says.
The announcement post
Crafting your “Hello, world!” note is almost like writing an angry letter. You don’t have to send it, but the act of doing it is valuable.
“Whether you ever post it or not, I’d encourage the founder to write an announcement post,” says Butler. “Do it yourself. This is something that should come straight from the founder — and explain your vision, why you built this thing and where you’re headed long-term.”
The exercise of compiling this founder manifesto of sorts is what’s most productive here, and not necessarily how polished and stirring you can make the writing itself. “Writing all of this down in narrative format will help you organize your thoughts around how your story fits into the zeitgeist and everything else that’s happening — aside from just the product and what it does.”
Writing is a great forcing function to get your head around how you talk about your company.
The announcement post forces you to articulate:
- Your corporate narrative
- Your “why now” and future vision
- How other news fits in, like your funding, hiring and story arc
Even if you ultimately don’t post this on launch day, don’t skip this artifact. “You might still pull from this later, whether that’s for your Series A pitch deck, getting ready to talk to the press or talking to other founders,” says Butler.
The social post
Finally, mock up the social post. “This one’s quicker, because you’re distilling everything from the website and the founder’s announcement into its simplest form,” she says.
It forces you to sharpen:
- Your highest-level message
- Which assets you need: video, image, tagline, etc.
- Whether your message actually lands
“The social post is a gut check. Do you sound fluffy? Are you embarrassed to post this as yourself? It’s a good way to make sure you’re not stuck in the marketing language of ‘optimizing workflow inefficiencies,’” says Butler. “It’ll make you much more confident that your message is authentic to you.”
Is a launch video worth the investment? “It depends on the nature of the product,” she says. “You have to figure out the best way to communicate the launch of this product as succinctly and powerfully as possible. I’d say most of the time, a video is the best way to do that, even if it’s as simple as a product demo. It can also be used above the fold on your website.”
For a more low-fi asset, try Figma CPO Yuhki Yamashita’s screenshot test: Can what you’re communicating be launched in a single screenshot (or screen recording) of the product, where someone coming at the post cold could understand what you’re launching? This is also a good test for whether your product can stand on its own without tons of explanation.
The where: Choose your distribution channels
You’ve got your website, announcement post and social post all queued up. Where should you broadcast them?
There’s a general launch channel playbook that will serve most tech founders. “But yours might be different depending on your ICP,” says Butler. “Remember that there are two audiences of your launch: Your target customers and the tech ecosystem, which sometimes live on different channels. And you need to share your news with both.”
So choose your platforms accordingly. Butler recommends not wasting your time trying to lure users into a brand-new channel. “No matter who your ICP is, find out where they currently hang out. If there’s a Reddit everyone’s in, join it. If it’s Roblox or Discord, go for it,” she says. “In the early days, you have to go to them. It’s really hard to get people into a new space in the beginning. So find ways to engage with that community where they already are.”
This is also when you should launch your brand handle on all channels you plan to engage with. “It’ll have no followers at first, so the social posts and amplification should come from the founder and early team. But you should set up the handles with the launch to get it started,” she says.
Make sure your personal accounts are set up on the channels you plan to launch on as well — and if you’re not, start one now. “In the early days, the founder is the brand. Your brand account will have zero followers, but you as a founder hopefully have some. People are much more likely to interact with you, the person, than this nebulous brand they’d never heard of until now,” she says. “Look at Dylan on Twitter. He’s prolific. And he was when Figma launched.”
Here’s Butler’s briefing on each of the classic launch channels:
Should you still launch on X/Twitter? You can’t ignore it, says Butler. “You have to be there, even if you don’t want to be,” she says. “I haven’t seen anywhere else online where more tech folks hang out than Twitter. So you’ll have your post from your brand account, and then you can quote-tweet or cross-share it from the founder’s personal account to share more context and your personal story.”
The same goes for LinkedIn. “Even if that’s not where your ICP is, you still have to use it. You probably have a ton of connections and you’ll get momentum there. It’s an expanding circle — the people who know you or know someone who knows you will be the first people to learn about your product. So work with what you have to start getting in front of people further away from you,” she says.
Butler also recommends emailing all of your current users — and throwing in everyone else you know onto that list, even your old roommate. “Even if they’re not your ICP, this starts to build concentric circles outside of your community,” she says.
Hacker News and Product Hunt aren’t as impactful for reach as they used to be, but they’re still a good surface area for exposure in the tech world, especially if you’re building a product for developers.
Butler’s final piece of advice for launch channels is to stop sweating over the PR exclusive. “You’re probably not going to get press,” she says. “It’s okay. It’s not as important as it used to be. It’s only viable if you’re combining your launch with a big funding announcement.”
So in her view, working with a PR agency isn’t a must at this stage. “You just need a long-form narrative piece to share around, but that can come from you. Sure, if you can land a TechCrunch, Verge or Fast Company article, that’s great for credibility, but it’s not necessary,” she says. If you’ve already secured some funding, you can work with your investor’s comms team on this.
Or try going direct. “Better yet, just send those pitches yourself as a founder. When Figma launched out of stealth, Dylan talked directly to Josh Constine. It was more authentic that way,” she says.
Prep your amplification strategy
“You can’t just put your launch posts out there and hope for the best,” says Butler. “You have to pre-seed it. To this day, that’s how we treat launches at Figma. Nothing is left to chance — we plan every detail with so many people ahead of time.”
Put together this list of folks to reach out to to help amplify your news:
- Your friends
- Industry influencers
- Beta users
- Your network
- Everyone you know
- Your mom
A few weeks ahead of the launch:
- Tell them when it’s happening
- Detail exactly what you need from them to help
On launch day:
- Share links
- Ask for reposts, upvotes, likes
- Amplify those who amplify you
“This way, you’re not going to launch to crickets. You know you’re at least launching to momentum from people you have a connection with,” she says. “You’re planning the distribution within your own circle. From there, the strength of your product and message will help you expand from that.”
Launch day is a starting line, not the finish line
With your materials and plan of action squared away well before launch, the day itself will feel more like admin (accompanied by plenty of jitters, of course). Just make sure you don’t save all your engagement with your burgeoning community for the day of.
“Keep monitoring and engaging with conversations about the product,” says Butler. “I’d also recommend bookmarking social posts about your company to start building a list of people to keep up with in the industry.”
There’s no need to get too scientific about quantifying your launch’s success. “So much of what matters here are vibes and momentum. Metrics are hard to track because you don’t have any benchmarks yet to compare them to,” she says. Still, there are numbers to lean on to loosely gauge momentum, like social impressions and engagements, web traffic and product sign-ups.
And what if the launch day fanfare doesn’t quite live up to your expectations? Remember that the work you did to prepare matters more in the long run than your performance on game day. A flashy launch isn’t a signal of product-market fit.
“You’re out there now. Just keep going,” says Butler. “A launch is a starting line. Even if you don’t bust out of the gate, you can catch up later. What you build and how customers react to it is ultimately more important.”