Hello and welcome back to Startup Curious, where we discuss things you should know if you’re thinking about working for or starting a startup.
Today’s topic is new feature launch plans. A common mistake startups make is planning out new features but forgetting to figure out how to tell the world that these new features exist. Ideally, every major new feature should have a launch plan - otherwise, you might miss out on some of the benefits of building the feature in the first place. After all, what use is a feature if your users and potential users aren’t aware of it?
The good news is that, once you’ve done it once or twice, you can basically reuse the same plan over and over again, just changing up the details. Here are some ideas for things you might want to include in your plan for a basic feature release:
Updating the marketing website
Updating the documentation
Updating any copy within the product that is no longer accurate
Updating ad campaigns
Writing an announcement blog post
Writing copy for social posts
Writing an email to send to existing customers
Creating assets (images, videos, gifs) for all of the above
It’s kind of a long list, huh? And that’s just for a basic feature launch - if you’re doing something major you may want to add things like coordinating PR or writing and sending out upgrade instructions to the to-do list.
It may feel a little overwhelming at first, but the easiest thing to do is to start to build this into your new feature planning process. Once you figure out who’s responsible for building the new feature and what timelines they have, also figure out who’s going to be responsible for getting everything done for the launch. Some of the things on the list take some time, so making sure someone will be able to put that time in is key.
One thing to note though: you don’t have to be perfect about your launch timing. If it’s easier to deploy a feature on Tuesday but you don’t have everything quite together, you can do all your announcements & updates later in the week. However, keep in mind that it may cause some confusion for people who stumble on the feature in your product but can’t find any reference or documentation about it.
Speaking of that, there’s one thing I left off the list that’s important once your team gets a little larger: making sure everyone internally is aware of the new features, especially any customer facing team members.
Getting blindsided by questions from customers about a feature you didn’t know existed never feels good, and it can actually cause some damage to your relationship to have your team members seem like they don’t know what’s going on. Take a couple minutes to write an email detailing whatever your team members need to know about an upcoming release - it’s worth the time! (And doing it via email is ideal because it’ll be easy for them to refer back to).
A final note: you should also have some version of this for small changes, bug fixes, etc. You don’t need to make an announcement every time you make a minor change, but you should have a plan to ensure people know about them if they need to. This could be something like keeping a running change log somewhere in your docs that you update once a week or an aggregate announcement email each month - whatever works best for your customer base.
And if you need inspiration, just check your inbox! I literally got a “Here’s what’s new in November 2022” email from Typeform as I was writing this. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel - find out what similar products to yours are doing and copy that.
Thanks for joining us today! If you found this episode useful, please remember to subscribe and share. Our goal is to make startups more approachable for everyone and the only way we can do that is to get the word out!
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If you have a topic you’d like to learn more about, or you’re a founder who would like their story featured on this show, send me an email at v@thescrappyoperator.com.
How do I write a new feature launch plan?