Launch day — a little logistics, a lot of luck

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals, about the better way to work and run your business. I'm your host, Kimberly Rhodes, with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen, co-founders of 37 Signals. Well, we've launched several products over the years at 37 Signals, and we just recently had a launch day with our new product, Fizzy. So I thought we'd talk a little bit about that launch day, what it entails, how we prepare for that. So let's just get started. First, Jason, are you picking your day? Is it a day of the week, a time of the day? How are you actually choosing like this is D-Day for us to go live?

0:33Yeah, historically, I think we've usually picked Tuesdays, mostly because Mondays, you know, people are digging out from a pile of things that are piled up over the weekend or whatever. They have other things going on. So Tuesday seems like a good day. I think a lot of companies do it on Tuesdays. So maybe Tuesday is not a good day. Maybe we should do it on Wednesdays. But it didn't seem like there was a lot going on at that time. Like you don't want to launch like the same day as an Apple keynote, maybe. Historically, that was the case. I don't know if it matters so much anymore since they're kind of recorded and people don't have to watch them live.

1:00But you just kind of pay a little bit of attention to what's going on in the world. We held up Haze launch years and years ago because things were going on in the world as well. So you just kind of pay attention enough. And we actually wanted to launch a few weeks earlier, but we didn't have the open source side of it all buttoned up yet. So we kind of want to make sure that was in place and a few other things were done just right before we launched. So we picked a Tuesday and we usually have our team call for Fizzy on Tuesday morning really early. So we had that call, kind of went around, make sure everything was ready to go and like basically hit the red button and launched it live while we were all kind of on a Zoom together.

1:37And David and I just announced on X and LinkedIn and watched the signups roll in. And it's always exciting to launch something new to see how people receive it. I think one of the biggest surprises, of course, was the open source piece of it. The pricing was also a big surprise. We gave a lot. We're very generous, a thousand cards for free and then only 20 bucks a month if you go beyond your thousand cards. So I think that was a big surprise. We'd already previewed the product quite a bit. Not everybody, because not everybody had seen it, but like a number of people had a feel for what it was going to be like.

2:05But the pricing and the open source piece and the free generous giveaway was quite a surprise up front. So it was always exciting to see that. And a lot of people put a lot of work into this. So it's just fun to sort of release and see what happens. Now, we had actually picked the launch date quite a long time in advance to something we typically do. It didn't exactly line up this time. There had to be some pushbacks on the launch date. But I think it's still quite helpful to drive the development by picking a date alone time in advance. Not because you're saying this exact amount of work has to be completed by this date, but to do it very much like we do it with ShapeUp.

2:44that we have this rough idea. We want to launch a great product, a great B1 packed of all the special things that we feel are most important to the essence of that product on this date. And then what exactly launches is quite variable. Sometimes we'll have a bunch of ideas for things that we thought should be in the product. It's interesting in the last episode, we were talking about some of the most frequent requests. And one of them was like, can I log in with a password? I actually had in my head early on that we would do both magic links that you put in your email address and you get a link and you click that link and pass keys.

3:23These two really go nicely hand in hand. And we ended up just not finishing the pass key part. And we ended up therefore launching just with magic links. That was part of that variable scope negotiation as you get closer and closer to launch, which is one of those things that just has the magic quality to drive the sometimes difficult part of figuring out what should be in the product. What should the product actually have? When you are staring at a launch date that gets closer and closer, your tunnel vision narrows in and it actually gets clearer and clearer what needs to go and what needs to stay.

4:02Because you can't have it all. There's only so much time left. So you got to just chuck some darlings over the railing and keep sailing and focus on getting to your destination with the essence of what you're trying to ship. And I think it can be difficult, actually. Even if you've done this a lot of times, to really do that prioritization process without having the looming deadline. And the funny thing, as I said, is when you get really close, like within six weeks or four weeks of something you've worked on for many months, or in this case, well over a year, you actually get just better and better at it.

4:42There's just a magic capacity of compressing the option space that makes you really efficient at picking like this is going, this is not going, off with that. And you get a little less precious. The further away you are from launch date, the more open you are to all sorts of expeditions and all sorts of ideas. Oh, maybe we could all try that. Or that idea sounds great. And that idea sounds great. And that idea is, yeah, everything fucking sounds great when there takes months to launch. When there's six days to launch, like, you know what? Nothing sounds great. Like you're literally just trying to chuck things over the railing just so you can get this thing shipped.

5:23And that's a really invigorating process, actually. And it's funny because our industry often has this mental image of crunch phase that is a very negative phase, at least for some people, that this is where all those commitments you've made all have to come do at the same time. And there's nothing you can do about it except work longer hours, except pull more all-nighters. And you know what? I sometimes waver a little bit on that. There can be something to that. There can be something to that final crunch thing. But if you look at the most pathological cases, like the gaming industry, where they'll sometimes be in this crunch phase for literally just months on end, that never seemed like it had a lot of appeal.

6:10Maybe that's because our industry is just very different or the stakes are lower, the budgets are different, smaller teams, blah, blah, blah. But just try to get a little of it. Even if you're trying to do what we're doing, which is be calm and collective and careful about how you do it most of the time, have a little bit of spice of, all right, now it's game time. Now it can have some pressure. Now you can exercise your product heart rate and capacity to ship something right here, right now. Now, you're also going to get some of that when you push the launch button. In fact, we were all on that call and we pushed the launch button and then we stayed on the call because it always happens that something isn't quite right.

6:50And one of the things we actually managed to do was to ship a bug where, as everyone was signing up, we were DDoSing ourselves. It was continuously refreshing this one page and you could just see the request per minute just skyrocketing. And we were like, ah, something not quite right here. It manifested itself in this weird bug where someone would refresh. And we looked at the numbers. And then we're like scrambling to quickly fix the issue. And I think that's actually, again, part of the fun. If I was to rank this fizzy launch, this was very calm by our historic average. Like when we launched Hay, that was probably the most uncommed, the most crazy launch we've ever had in the history of the company.

7:35And it wasn't just about being a little nutty for a couple of hours or a day or 24 hours. It was just bonkers for two, three weeks. Some of it was because we paired the launch with an epic fight with Apple over our right to be in the app store. But also some of it was we were launching a very complicated, intricate product, email, and we suddenly had hundreds of thousands of people signed up in a blink of an eye. That was pretty intense in a way I think busy wasn't. And you know what's funny? Is now I look very fondly back upon the Hay Lodge. This is how it often goes. Like in the moment you go like, oh my God, I can't take this anymore.

8:19This is literally day five of me sleeping not very many hours. This is very out of the norm for a company that wrote it doesn't have to be crazy at work. And then now I look back upon that like five years later and like, ah, that was kind of special. It's funny how that goes. So I think it's kind of a way of trying to have it both ways. Most of the times, having this calm way of working yourself up to the launch, you don't have it months and months on end. But also like a dash of exhaustion is not the worst thing in the world. Okay, so David, you mentioned like picking a date and the launch date.

8:55And it wasn't exactly the date that we first started. Those were all like internal deadlines. I'm curious about the choice to not pre-tell the audience about a date. From what I understand or what I remember, we posted something on Twitter like next week and then tomorrow. But it wasn't like we said the date is going to be November X and like counted down on a website, as some companies do. Kind of talked me through the decision about when to actually tell the public that it's launching. Was it a decision, Jason? There's really no big advantage to picking a date publicly. unless you have like a trade show or there's something like that that's actually gonna happen that you have to do.

9:32I think it puts unnecessary pressure on you if you can apply enough pressure to yourself normally anyway. I mean, we wanted to get this thing out the door. We'd already invited about, I think it was 2 ,200 people who signed up for the beta list. So we'd already got them all invited. We wanted to get this thing out the door as soon as we possibly could. But to say a certain day and then not hit it, now you're late and what's the point of that? So just like, it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter. Internally, we stuck to the date December 2nd that we were going to launch, and that's good enough.

10:03And then we did a little bit of teasing the day before. I think if you pre-announce a date other than that, unless you have like a big, again, a big marketing campaign, like we do things very organically here. So if you have a bunch of media buys and are already purchased and placements and promotions and stuff, then you have to hit a date that you've set for yourself. But we don't do that. So we were able to be a bit more fluid about it. Frankly, look, people are not sitting around waiting for you to launch a product. They're just not. Like you're waiting to launch a product. They're not waiting for you to launch a product.

10:31There might be a handful of people who are. So it created all this like unnecessary drama for no one who's really paying attention anyway. And remembering, I'm going to put this on a calendar that in seven weeks, this company is going to launch this new thing. Like no one's doing that anyway. So I just don't see the point of risking missing a date that you made public. This is also tied to the fact that we tend not to make promises in public unless we know we can absolutely keep the promise. We've burned ourselves a few times saying we're going to launch something by the end of the year or do this by this time.

10:59And then we don't get it done. And then you just feel bad about it. And there's no reason for that. So it's a good way to avoid feeling bad about something that should be a good feeling in general. Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because I started thinking, what are products that I'm actually waiting for and counting down? And it's only things that have a limited supply. Like a brand is launching and it's the spring collection. And I know that they're going to run out. Like that's the only time I'm like counting down or putting something on my calendar. Whereas like software, we have like unlimited supply.

11:30Yeah. And I think those are situations where if that's the brand, if they're launching new lines all the time or drops or whatever, like frequently, we launch a new product every five years or something like that, like whatever it is. So it's not part of the standard cadence and the standard strategy. If it was, that's a different story. But I think for something like this, you don't really need to do that. You can, you know, but I just don't think you really need to. Like, I don't think it would have made a difference. The risk would have been we would have been late and then it's anticlimactic versus like just dropping it the day before we're like tomorrow.

12:00And that's like enough. Who's paying attention before that anyway? That's the other thing you realize when you do this, even after you launch, which we might get to, massive interest on day one. And then it just slides a little bit and slides and slides and slides because it moves off the timeline, it's gone. And then you have to kind of continue to generate interest, right? A launch is a similar thing. Like if you pre-announce a launch 12 days ahead of time, no one's going to even remember in 12 days that it's going to launch. It's just it's gone. It's old news. So just I think the day before is probably enough to get people excited.

12:33Okay. And then on that note, I'm curious about launch day in general, like marketing. It's really the two of you guys were posting it on X to your audiences. Like in general, how do you think it went? And how was this launch in comparison to the promotion for something like K? It's been, what, five years? I don't know if marketing over the course of that five years has changed. I think marketing has changed over the past five years. I think the fact that algorithmic feeds have now taken over everything and dominates platform from X to Instagram to LinkedIn to whatever is a big change. you are no longer guaranteed that even your very dedicated part of the audience that you've accumulated will see anything that you post in your feed.

13:24Now, I know this is all happened to marketers on Facebook when Facebook introduced the algorithmic feed, I don't know, 15 years ago. But on X, which has been a big platform for us for a very long time, it's more recent that the For You page has become so algorithmically driven that many of our followers do not see what we post unless those posts go really viral. And it's a bit of a funny place to be. And Jason and I were actually just talking about this today, where the traditional payoff for building up a large online audience is that you might be enriching their lives in all sorts of ways and And either entertaining them or teaching them or otherwise enriching that feed a bit with the implicit understanding that occasionally I'll have something to sell.

14:18This is Gary Vee's jab, jab, right hook. Is that right? Yeah, that's it. And this notion that most of the time you're giving, you're giving, you're giving. And then one out of a hundred times you're asking for something in return. I do fear a little bit that the focus of the algorithmic feeds on the viral takeoff tweets or LinkedIn posts or whatever have broken that promise to the point where it's not nearly as valuable as it once was to just give 99 % of the time for the one out of 100 time to ask for something. if that ask never makes it out there. And I think we have large enough platforms that, do you know what?

15:03There's a lot of large numbers that tons of people will see when we launch something new like Fizzy. And they did, but it wasn't quite the same as it used to be. And it required more effort on our part to keep up the momentum. And I think this is where the open source component of Fizzy's launch worked really well, that, as I said, you can give something 99 % of the time and ask one time, which is why you can't just, you can't keep shilling your product on your feed. No one's interested in that. They will tune out real quick, even in the organic world where they would see your tweets. They'd go like, well, okay, I've had enough of that.

15:44The open source launch in part is a permission slip that we're giving you something when I'm tweeting about some aspect of the code base that's particularly interesting. Here's how to learn something about how you do something in Rails or here's someone who contributed something. I get to have a little bit of both and maybe there's now more of a requirement to mix these things together because you don't get to do the clean ask anymore because the algorithm will just swallow it. I don't think that's a great thing necessarily for these things, but it's so hard to see how it's all going to play out.

16:21And on the flip side, if you generally are a person who can write or share interesting things or funny things or entertaining things, you do have more of a capacity right now to make that stuff go places. Like in the old world, if you had 500 followers and you tweeted the most brilliant insight on the news of the day, it wasn't going to go anywhere. Now, it might very well because of the way of the algorithmic acceleration. So some of it is also just the game changes. And I think this is something that's particularly clear to Jason and I, because we've been at the game for so long. When we talk SaaS, we've been in the game since when did we launch single file?

17:022002? Something like that. Literally 24 years almost. The game has changed several times over, and it does feel like right now we're in one of those turnings where every single other social network that we've historically used have now jumped on the everything is algorithm all the time. It also shows, I think, how valuable an email list is. Granted, like the problem there, too, is that with AI running a lot of email platforms, you have no idea what you're going to see either, what's going to be deemed important and not important. So there's a lot of control that's been lost by people. People don't have control anymore of what they're seeing and what they're being shown, which is interesting.

17:45I mean, you can't fight against it. It just is what it is. But it's an interesting change, really interesting change. I don't think people are totally aware of it either. I mean, maybe enough who are savvy are, but like I barely see David's tweets anymore or posts, whatever they're called now. Like I occasionally I do. If I go to his timeline, I'm like, damn, there's been a lot of stuff going on. I haven't seen like we're business partners. Like we like I don't even see it. Right. A friend of mine who I just saw walking the dog a few days ago, he's like, where you been on Twitter, man? I'm like, I've been right here.

18:14He's like, I don't see your stuff anymore. I used to see my stuff all the time. We talk about all the time. Someone somewhere, well, actually not someone, something somewhere decided that he shouldn't see my stuff anymore for whatever reason. He's like, I've been seeing a lot of really dark shit instead. I'm like, yeah, I know. That's probably what's going on. right? My stuff is not outrage enough, you know? So anyway, whatever it is, like, we don't know anymore and we don't see. And so it does change marketing and you start to wonder, like, what do you do? Well, email lists again. If you have a big email list that's direct and that's reliable and fresh, that's one thing you can at least hopefully maybe directly reach people, maybe you have a better shot, perhaps, maybe not, who knows.

18:51And then it comes out of paid placement, of course, which is incredibly expensive. And depending on what industry you're in, you might be completely priced out. And then you just have to come up with like, you know, you're like, well, I was just viral hit after viral hit after viral hit, which is basically impossible as well. It's a very, very challenging environment, I think, for new companies, especially who are starting up. We have major advantages because we've been around for a long time, had big audiences. So even if only 30 % of my audience sees something, it's still a huge number. Same with David's is even bigger than mine.

19:20So we still have that. But if you're starting brand new today, it's tough. It's really got to be incredibly tough. I don't think any advice that I have is valid at all anymore, frankly, on that side of things. Other than like, you got to make what you want to make. You got to love what you're doing. You got to be interested in it. And it's got to be good. But like, I don't know what else you do, frankly. And in some ways, it's a curious return to the before times where so much of product success from the vantage point of the new starting entrepreneur was based on word of mouth. You simply had to create a great product Get a handful of people to use that And then rely on the fact that they would tell others I do think that mechanism still works It's as hard to track as it ever was Of how does it work, how long does it take And I do think it's easier to get discouraged these days Because there's been an inflation in everything Like you will be comparing your launch to someone else's launch and go like, oh man, only 100 people signed up.

20:24I just saw an X that someone launched and they got thousands of people. That comparison of the numbers all the time, I do think can have this suppressing effect when in some ways that core word of mouth engine, which was always the most powerful engine for most entrepreneurs as they were starting out. I seem to remember stories about Phil Knight selling Nikes out of the back of his van and just really starting from literally the ground up, right? And realizing it's not just going to happen overnight. But on the flip side, you see constant these quote-unquote overnight successes. You see these things that do go viral and you compare yourself in that image and it looks a little shit.

21:11And I think we're in this weird middle space where we have still a large share of those advantages of the... internet way of doing things while also realizing that other aspects of it is more akin to what it was back in the day. And it's funny because that insight has driven some of the product decisions we've done over the year. So Hey, for example, has this Hey World feature where you can build your email list. And one of the conscious decisions we made really early on was not to shove your subscriber count in your face because seeing these low numbers, they're more of a curse than an encouragement.

21:51Back in the day, we didn't know how many people read our blog, Signal vs. Noise, when we first got started. Then we got our SLS, and you got some indication of how many subscribers that you had, but it was still very vague and very fuzzy. And there's a great liberation in just not knowing and just trusting that if you make a great product and you can convince a handful of people to use it and that they like it, they'll pass it on. This was what happened at a perhaps an accelerated race and perhaps in a way that is now discouraging to others with a macho over the summer. That it went from literally just this pseudo hoppy thing that I was doing because I was just interested in this one thing to hundreds of thousands of people had downloaded overnight.

22:35Right. And then I look at that and go like, well, how can I replicate that? How can I just take that and apply that? But everyone's like, well, you can't. A big part of it was it just resonated with people and the word of mouth engine really kicked in, which can then be accelerated by the fact that those people can then be tweeting about it. And you can have these viral effects of it, too. But you can't bet on it. So I think the only thing that is sure is what do you control? You control how much effort and polish and talent and ingenuity and great ideas you put into the thing that you make And you can just do it as good as you can and you got to put it out then you got to go like, okay Do you know what?

23:18I need to divorce my sense of self My sense of satisfaction in the work and my sense of am I a good human from where's this going to go? because you don't have a ton of control over it. And I think it is harder than ever to do that given everything we've just talked about. Yeah, I think the other thing is, to David's point, word of mouth, quality of product. That has to be there to begin with, right? But I remember back in the early days, we would also attend, you know, it's hard to tease this thing out. Like we would also attend a lot of events and speak and be part of the community more. And there was more of that way back in the day.

23:55There are still events and still conferences, but I think far fewer of them. And I don't know who's attending them. But my guess would be if you're brand new, you should be at a lot of them, actually, because it's one of the only things you can do to. This is, by the way, a change in my perspective. I don't think I would have said this a few years ago, but it's the only sort of direct connection you might have with potential customers where you get to say something. You get to be yourself on stage. You get to talk. You get to share. and you know the people out in the audience have a pretty good chance of hearing what you're saying versus on social, you say something and someone else decides who gets to hear it.

24:29So at least maybe the 300 or 400 people in the room will hear you and you can be sure of that. You can network a bit. And this is like not my, I don't like this stuff. This is not my thing. But if I think if I was starting over, I'd probably want to do that because I think a pure online launch is actually becoming harder and harder and harder and harder and harder and may never be easy again. and there's also that adage that like a person has to hear something seven times i think it is before resonates before they're actually going to try it so i would imagine that at some point you're like i'm sick of talking about this but you have to keep talking about it like you have to keep tweeting it even though you're like i've been talking about it incessantly for seven days yeah and different people like what's interesting to me is we've been talking about fizzy i'm not sure if this is your experience david probably was on on x for the past few months and I would still get, and I'd be like, we're launching tomorrow and I'd still get someone go, what's fizzy?

25:22I hadn't heard of that. They're in my feed. Like they follow me and they'd never heard of it. I've been talking about it for months. So you just, they hadn't seen it yet for whatever reason, the algorithm didn't pass it by them. And so you just, you know, even though you're repeating yourself, you're saying new things to new people all the time and you kind of got to use that. It's just like, you know, if you're the stones playing for 50 years, you're playing the hits and that's what people want to hear and you're probably sick and fucking tired of it. But like, People are coming out to hear. And so you've just got to get used to that.