What are some innovative launch activities you've done that were successful (or not so successful)?

SUCCESSFUL:   - At Bluestacks in 2011, we were gearing up to launch software that let you run any Android app on a Windows PC. I had letterpressed wedding invitations made for the union of Android and Windows and sent them to around 100 thought-leaders in tech including Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos etc. It included a link to an early VIP alpha version of the product. Around 30 of them went to the link and Kevin Rose wrote us a nice tweet. When we launched weeks later we ended up with 20X t ...Read More

In a previous role, it had been awhile since the team I was working with had shipped anything. We were heading into the holidays and I was starting to worry about demonstrating momentum, especially as our sales team worked to hit their quotas. A ton of small features were in the works but nothing that was going to cut through the noise of holidays etc. I convinced the team to do a “12 days of Christmas” release schedule (which we ended up making non-denominational of course). Starting Dec 1 we r ...Read More

Success = Changed the behavior of the customer to embrace the transformative shift. For every successful launch, we were able to change the behavior of the customer, and the customer created a habit to use that experience.  We think about metrics that will show a behavior shift of the customer, not just general revenue or product adoption uplift. For example, retention numbers on the new product matched with growth will show if this is a change in behavior, or if it's simply a blip due to strong ...Read More

John, Emily, Susan, and Mike have captured the spirit well. The wedding invitations and 12-day release cadence are exactly the kind of moves that stand out in consumer and SMB markets. I'll add the enterprise B2B angle, because "innovative" means something different when your buyers are procurement teams and your launch audience is a 300-person sales force. At Tableau, one launch stands out. Instead of issuing a press release and building a reference page, we invited five of our top enterprise c ...Read More