10 Best Product Launch Examples to Learn From

Set the goals? Check.

Assigned roles to everyone on the team? Check.

Double-checked the marketing efforts? Check. 

Product tested from every angle? Check.

Welcome to the grind, product teams!

For B2B businesses, product launches are crucial. It is this product launch that will decide the fate of your business, and the efforts you've spent improving your product. 

Surely, it needs to be the best. But what's the best way to do it?

We asked 10 B2B businesses on how they launched their product, and quirky marketing campaigns they executed to win the game. 

Take a dive, and get inspired.

What is a product launch?

A product launch is a business's planned and coordinated effort to introduce the product or service to the market. The goal of these product launches is, building anticipation and getting the target market excited about using the product.

Plus, these launches help in gathering user feedback about the product, find early adopters, and create momentum and recognition for the company in the market. Ideally, these product launches are done for a brand-new product you're launching or a new product feature you want to get eyeballs on.

A product launch is usually divided into three stages: planning, execution, and analysis.

During the planning stage, product teams, sales teams, and marketing teams brainstorm on crafting a product launch strategy. Once the launch strategy is created, they move to executing launch marketing activities. Mostly, these marketing campaigns start even before the product is launched, usually called pre-launch, and continue even after the product is launched. Finally, the results from the launch are analyzed to find whether the company could meet its launch goals or not.

The 3 Stages of Product Launch

A product launch has different departments working together to produce and execute a multi-step, multi-channel launch. 

Here’s what that process looks like in detail: 

1. Setting Launch Goals

Make sure to set goals that are clear, measurable, and defined by a timeframe. Here are a few goals that you can start with:

• Determine the total revenue: Decide on the amount of revenue you’d like to achieve from the product launch.
• Calculate the number of customers required: Divide the expected revenue by the average sales revenue to get the number of customers you need to sign up for your product and meet your revenue goal.
• Understand your sales-win rate ratio: Based on the past sales (and conversion), determine how many prospects you’d need to have in your pipeline, to hit your conversion goals

2. Setting Campaigns Before The Official Launch Day

Starting the campaigns weeks before the product launch day is also called pre-launch. The goal of setting a pre-launch campaign is to create hype among the relevant audiences. This way, by the time the product is launched, they’ll be excited to try out the product — bringing you initial users.

Few tactics to set the stage for your pre-launch strategy:

• Create a lead generation landing page where people can pre-register themselves to get the launch updates.
• Release teasers sharing about the product launch, or a specific feature of the product to get people excited.
• Build hype through influencer content (can share about the product on social media, or on their email list).
• Connect with niche communities where you can introduce your product to the community audience (who are your ICPs) and get feedback from them.

3. Tracking Product Launch Metrics

With the help of product launch metrics, you can determine how your product launch performs. This will help you understand your launch’s progress. Here are the metrics you must track for a successful launch:

• Number of signups to product waiting list: By tracking this metric, you’ll know the number of people who are interested in using your product when the product launches officially.
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• K-factor: Also called as viral coefficient, this is a referral marketing metric that indicates the effectiveness of your referral marketing efforts. By tracking this metric, you’ll get to know how effective your referral marketing program is, and whether you should tweak your marketing strategy or not.
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• Revenue: By tracking this metric, you’ll know the total revenue you have made with the launch. This will help you measure your overall product launch success. 
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• Social media engagement rate: By tracking this metric, you’ll know the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. Some of the engagement metrics you should focus on include views, comments, shares, and saves. However, you may want to consider getting help of experts with the right analytic tool if your goal is to grow this channel for better brand awareness.
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• Number of paying customers: By tracking this metric, you’ll know whether you’re able to meet your revenue goal, or not. If not, this metric will help you determine how many more paying customers you need to achieve your revenue goal.
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• Customer retention rate: By tracking this metric, you’ll be able to determine customer loyalty, and how many users in your customer base continue using your product, and why.
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• NPS: While a product launch can be a whirlwind, capturing user sentiment early is crucial.  An NPS survey shortly after users start interacting with your product can reveal initial impressions and areas for improvement. We recommend using Usersnap to set up an NPS survey.

Also Read: How to Launch a SaaS Product [Checklist Included]

10 Successful Product Launch Examples

After talking to multiple B2B brands and understanding their approach to creating a successful product launch plan, we have curated a few product launch examples. 

Here are 10 product launch examples you can take inspiration from and execute your upcoming product launch. 

1. Reply.io 

Reply.io successfully launched Jason AI, capitalizing on being the first AI product in its niche and quickly adapting its roadmap to new market trends.

“We categorized our launch strategy into two main activities: short-term and long-term. Short-term activities involve making product announcements on platforms like Product Hunt, while our long-term efforts revolve around integrating the product into our communication strategy, from our landing pages and the retargeting campaigns,"

Maxsym Zubenko, the Head of Product Marketing at Reply.io said.

The brand integrated its product launch into its overall communication. They changed the website home page by:

• adding AI focus and feature description
• creating a product-focused landing page

This product launch impacted the overall marketing activities of the brand like hosting AI-focused events, social and blog content, and adding AI-focused channels for AI news distribution.

Maxsym further added,

‍"We understood that our customers were not just looking for features, they were seeking solutions to their unique challenges, and we defined that AI could help save time and accelerate users' workflows."

Why do we like this product launch?

• Reply.io integrated the product launch into its overall brand communication and marketing activities.

2. xTiles

xTiles, a note-taking tool created a user onboarding process to onboard beta customers before launching their product. For this, they:

• reached out to people on LinkedIn, who fell on their category of ICPs.
• showcased the tool over a Zoom video call and asked them to sign up for the tool.

Once they onboarded the beta user, they invited them to their slack community where the beta user could share their learnings about the tools, ask questions, or share product feedback with xTiles's team.

Before the product launch, xTiles's team reached out to their beta users sharing with them about the product launch and if the beta users would be interested in giving a shoutout to xTiles for their product launch.

This way, they created the hype and launched the product on Product Hunt. Result? They had a massive success on their product launch.

They received an impressive engagement on Product Hunt with 2,804 upvotes and 303 comments. 

They also won three badges for the success of their product launch on Product Hunt: 1st Product of the Day, 1st Product of the Week, and 2nd Product of the Month.

Why do we like this product launch?

• It leverages user adoption in the early phase of the product, which helps them improve their product before the launch.
• Building a community of beta users on Slack helped them boost engagement for their product launch.

3. Userpilot

UserPilot launched a new product feature called UserPilot Analytics and launched it on Product Hunt to create hype about the product launch.

A day before the product launch, they sent out an email to all their email subscribers about the launch date and information about the launch webinar that the company is conducting to educate the Userpilot users about the new feature in detail. 

To share about their product in detail over email, they leveraged GIFs.in their email campaigns

At the end of the email, they invited the email subscribers to follow the launch on Product Hunt and to attend the live launch webinar.

The webinar was hosted by Yazan Sehwail, Co-founder & CEO of Userpilot, Kevin O'Sullivan, Head of Product Design, and Jonathan Hodges, Head of AI & Machine Learning.

In the webinar, they showcased the benefits of their feature while giving the context to users on why they launched the specific feature.

Why do we like this product launch?

• They created the hype by pre-launching it on Product Hunt. This created a good engagement among users before the actual product launch.
• They showcased the benefits of their product features in the launch webinar and interacted with their users in real-time.
• They offered a 1-month free trial (extended) to increase feature adoption.

4. LightFunnels

Meenank Minnu shares,

‍ "We leveraged webinars and virtual events for the product launch of LightFunnels." 

They leveraged meme marketing for this product launch. They ran memes as ads, did pre-sales, added a token amount to reserve the product, and giveaways and contests to attract people to this product launch.

They ran these campaigns for a month, and within an hour of the product launch virtual event, they made a whopping $100K.

Why do we like this product launch?

• They created scarcity with their campaigns with the taglines like 100 licenses left.
• With the help of giveaways and contests, they gathered good engagement, which helped them achieve traffic for their product launch.

5. HackerEarth

HackerEarth, a technical recruiting platform launched its product — FaceCode. First, it started with a teaser campaign on LinkedIn.

Next, the company launched the product on Product Hunt. They received a good engagement on the platform with 317 upvotes and 94 comments. Plus, the product received the top rank for their product listing. Incredible, right?

Then, they published a product launch blog post on HackerEarth's website. The article included every minor detail about the product, its key features, and the pain points the product addresses. Additionally, they included product screenshots to break down the complexity of the product for their target audience i.e., recruiters and hiring managers.

Finally, they did the launch webinar where they showcased the live demo of their product.

Why do we like this product launch?

•  They created hype for the product by launching the teaser on the channel where most of their customers and users were present i.e., LinkedIn.
• They increased the engagement with their audience via webinars. This helped them not only showcase the product but address all the pressing questions attendees had about the product.

6. Topmate

When Topmate launched its product, the brand decided to do this via the community route. They had already decided to launch it in a lot of communities full of creators. Plus, they used their alumni network to get more eyeballs.

While building the product, the brand interacted with close to 170+ creators and diligently listened to their suggestions. This way, they got valuable insights and understood the creators’ specific demands to be included in the product.

Furthermore, the first time they launched the product in the market, they leveraged their community of creators. They shared the product with their community, and the creators used their product and shared it on LinkedIn. Because creators shared about the product via their LinkedIn posts, people got to know about the brand and the impact it was creating with its product.

Shubham Khoker, the Growth Head at Topmate says,

‍ "When it comes to the campaign, we always knew conventional digital marketing gimmicks wouldn't be helpful for us. So, we decided to build our campaigns around our users only."

Khoker talks about one of their recent campaigns, YouWeCan where they collaborated with Indian cricketer, Yuvraj Singh to support a good cause — support cancer patients. 

As part of this charity campaign, they featured their users (creators) on Time Square.

Our basic idea was to give Topmate's users some avenues to feel proud about themselves via us, and if they feel so, then we will grow.

Khoker concludes by saying,

"Keeping things simple and making our users feel heard have been two crucial pillars of our strategy. An in-product feedback mechanism from our 100k+ user base has made our product development fast-paced but efficient too."

Why do we like this product launch?

• They used rigorous user research to find out about the pain points of their users and to craft their campaigns.
• They leveraged their social media and their community of users to create hype about the product.

7. Punchh

Punchh wanted to launch into different market segments such as grocery chains, convenience stores, and so on. When launching its product in the grocery segment, Punchh leveraged Storylane to create an interactive product tour. By doing this, they were able to save a lot of their time and the repetitive work they would have done otherwise.

The marketing team then inserted the interactive product demo on its website.

Why do we like this product launch?

• Punchh was able to create overview demos and detailed use cases for each type of stakeholder to showcase the features and value of the product relevant to their pain points through interactive product demos.

Also Read: How Storylane Helped Punchh’s Expansion to Niche Industries

8. ClickUp

When ClickUp launched ClickUp docs, they wanted to increase user adoption for their product. So, besides sharing about the launch on their social media platforms, and their employees sharing about the new product release on their social media handles, ClickUp leveraged influencer marketing.

With this campaign, they reached out to influencers on platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. Next, they asked the influencers to share valuable information (relevant to their expertise) with their audience using ClickUp Docs, and share it as a social media post. 

The best part? They didn't ask the influencers to promote their product or talk in detail about it. Instead, they encouraged them to use the product.

Here are the results that one of the influencers achieved by using ClickUp docs and sharing with their audience on LinkedIn: 

Why do we like this product launch?

They showed the ultimate social proof but let the influencers test-drive the product and left the marketing take off from word of mouth.

9. Mailmodo

Mailmodo launched in January 2021. The company started its launch journey with Product Hunt, where they were crowned with the badge 'Top Product For the Day.'

This helped the company introduce its nascent brand to an enthusiastic community that loves new products and helps with customer feedback. Mailmodo got its first set of signups from Product Hunt.

Besides the Product Hunt launch, the company also used the following marketing channels:

1. Social Media: They started talking about our product and how it could help our ICP. This happens even today in a more organized way.
2. Word of mouth: The company used its network of professional well-wishers, investors, family, and friends to get the word out. Some of their earliest customers came via referrals.

Why do we like this product launch?

• Mailmodo identified where their early adopters would be available and willing to give our product a chance, i.e. Product Hunt.
• They worked on their product positioning and product messaging to attract the right audience while persuading them to take a look at their product.

10. Adriel

Adriel, a B2B SaaS marketing dashboard software, launched their product on Product Hunt and Appsumo, where their target audience was active.

Through these platforms, the company landed users who were willing to try the product and give feedback. With the AppSumo launch, Adriel gained 500+ new active users and generated $20K in revenue.

Next, the company focused on building a community of loyal users. They hosted online and offline events to connect with marketers (who were not their customers). For example, in one of their online events, Austin Marketing Summit, they networked with 120 marketers around Austin. Additionally, they used WhatsApp, Kakaotalk, LinkedIn, and blogs to engage with the community further.

Why do we like this product launch?

• Adriel identified the platform where their ideal target users are active and launched on those specific platforms to gain early adopters.
• They focused on building a community of their target audience and nurturing relationships with them.

Get. Set. Go, and Launch.

Now you know how these B2B brands executed their product launch, and the different marketing campaigns that boosted the success of their launch. 

So, what are you waiting for? Replicate these examples for yourself, and launch your product. 

Q1. What are the three types of product launch?

There are three types of product launches: soft launch, minimal launch, and full-scale launch.

• Soft launch: It launches the product or features to a limited set of audience.
• Minimal launch: It launches a limited set of features and functions.
• Full-scale launch: It launches the entire product to its audience.

Q2. What does a product launch look like?

Here are the three product launch stages: planning, execution, and analysis.

• Planning: This is where you set the goals, research the target audience and competition, and create a market strategy.
• Execution: This is the official launch day when you’ll start executing your marketing campaigns in full spree. 
• Analysis: This is where you’ll evaluate the marketing efforts of your product launch and track the KPIs and other goals that you have accomplished.

Q3. How do you announce a new product launch?

There are multiple ways to announce a product launch like creating product launch email campaigns, sharing a teaser on social media, or through in-app messaging.