Q: I’m planning to launch my product soon, and wondering how companies generate buzz when they launch?
Here’s the hard truth: No one cares about your new product.
As Marc Andreessen said, “everyone’s time is already allocated.” With hundreds of products launching each day and endless ads clamoring for our attention, how do you get over the event horizon of attention? Easy: DO SOMETHING REMARKABLE.
“Remarkable is a really cool word, because we think it just means neat, but it also means worth making a remark about.”
ー Seth Godin
Your goal is to create something worth remarking about. Something people will stop and pay attention to, and have to share with their friends. Seth Godin explores this idea further (starting at 6:58m):
Great, be remarkable. Thanks, Lenny! How the hell do you do that? Well, I’ve got some answers. I spent the past few weeks collecting and categorizing the buzziest launches I could find. Below, you’ll find the ten most common strategies for launching something worth remarking about (including 49 real-life examples).
I hope the examples below inspire you and your team to create something remarkable ✨
Let’s dive in.
1. Release a remarkable video
2. Create a remarkable product demo
3. Offer a remarkable value prop
- Robinhood: “$0 commission stock brokerage”
- Dropbox: “Throw away your USB drive”
- Gmail: “Free email with 1GB of storage”
- Netflix: “No Due Dates, No Late Fees”
- Warby Parker: “Try on five pairs of frames at home for free before buying any”
- Spotify: “All of the world’s music – for free”
- Coin: “Replace eight of your credit cards with just one”
- Eero: "Finally, WiFi that works”
4. Execute a remarkable offline stunt
- Half.com renamed a town in Oregon to “Half.com” for a year
- Salesforce hired fake protesters, commandeered all the taxis at a rival’s event and used them to deliver a 45-minute pitch, etc.
- WePay dropped 600 pounds of ice in front of PayPal’s conference
- Snapchat dropped off strange vending machines at random locations in LA with a limited number of Spectacles
- Tommee Tippee turned parenting help books into limited-edition baby wipes.
5. Start a remarkable controversy
- Yo: An app that only lets you send “Yo” to your friends raises $1m
- Quibi: Celebrity founders raise ~$2B for a pre-product video platform
- Hey.com: Public figure calling out Apple for their App Store fees
- Stolen: An app that lets you “buy” your friends on Twitter
- Zillow: Zestimates telling you the value of your home
6. Offer a remarkable giveaway
- Push for Pizza: One lucky winner at each school will win a pizza scholarship, AKA free pizza for an entire semester, delivered by a Lamborghizza.
- Fast: $5 hoodies
- Uniswap: Free token distribution.
7. Include a remarkable viral mechanic
- Jet.com gave away 100,000 shares of stock options to the person who referred the most signups [Led to acquiring 350,000 users ahead of launch]
- Dropbox gave free storage for you and any friend you refer [Contributed to growth from 100k to 4m users in 15 months]
- Harry’s gave users had the opportunity to earn free products by sharing an invite with friends. The more friends who signed up using your unique referral link, the bigger the prize you earned. [Led to capturing 100,000 emails in one week]
- Robinhood gave users priority access by referring their friends (along with a remarkable value prop, see above). [Led to 1 million users before launch]
- Ritual gave you $1 lunch (max 4 items) for referring a friend. [“At one point seemingly EVERYONE in the city was in a land grab to refer their friends.”]
8. Get a remarkable hard-to-get product to be shared by influencers or press
- Hey.com: Promoted by DHH (~400k Twitter followers), while being invite-only [Lead to 180k people waitlist]
- Superhuman: Used by an increasing number of tech influencers (which you can see in email signatures), while being invite-only [Led to 275k people waitlist]
- Clubhouse: Mentioned by an increasing number of tech influencers (which you see on Twitter), while being invite-only
- ThirdLove: Launched with press and influencer marketing [Led to 1.3 million people waitlist]
- OnePlus One: A cheap smartphone that you could only get by invitation [Led to selling over 1.5 million units in 12 months]
- Mailbox: Known founder launches a slick new product, while having a visible waitlist [Led to 800k people waitlist]
9. Carry out a remarkable pre-launch tease
- 👁️👄👁️ : It is what it is [Led to 20,000 email signups and $200,000 for charity]
- Chobani: Every day counted down (using different fruit to represent the number of days remaining) to a mysterious announcement — turned out to be new flavors
- Segway: “After nearly a year of speculation, Dean Kamen's mysterious machine — IT — was revealed on ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.”
10. Be remarkably everywhere
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Toucan: The founders got their investors and friends to “claim” a word and Tweet about it. [Led to 100% month of month growth]
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Venmo: Mysterious “Lucas uses Venmo” posters all over the NYC subway system. [Led to a 40% increase in daily signups]
- Twitter (and Foursquare) at SXSW: They set up a tweet visualization screens and negotiated with the conference to put them in the main hallways in the Austin Convention Center.
Notable mention: Remarkable ongoing drum-beat of buzz
Have other examples to share? Leave a comment👇
See you next week!
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Sincerely,
Lenny 👋