Go-to-Market Plays #1: When To Do a Launch

Summary

Summary of "Go-to-Market Plays #1: When To Do a Launch" – The Marketing Millennials Podcast

Episode Release Date: April 2, 2025
Host: Daniel Murray
Guest: Tamara Graminski, Award-Winning Product Marketer & Former VP of Product Marketing at Kajabi

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1. Introduction to the Episode

In the premiere episode of the "Go to Marketplace" mini-series, host Daniel Murray welcomes Tamara Graminski, an esteemed product marketer with over a decade of experience in both startups and scale-ups. The focus of the conversation is to dissect effective go-to-market (GTM) strategies, emphasizing practical tactics that marketers can implement immediately to enhance their product launches.

2. Understanding Demand Seeding

Demand seeding emerges as the central theme of the episode. Tamara defines it as a strategic approach where marketers cultivate anticipation, exclusivity, and curiosity before the official launch of a product. Instead of launching to a cold audience, demand seeding involves engaging a pre-interested and enthusiastic audience, ensuring a successful and impactful launch.

Tamara Graminski [02:48]:
"Demand seeding is the art of creating anticipation, exclusivity, and curiosity. If you start planting the right seeds early, on launch day it almost feels inevitable. You have people waiting, excited, and there's a lot of hype."

Key Insights:

• Advanced Engagement: Initiating marketing efforts well before the launch to build momentum.
• Avoiding Starting from Zero: Preventing the scenario where marketers begin with no audience engagement on launch day.
• Rolling Thunder Concept: Implementing a gradual increase in awareness leading up to the launch, akin to the buildup of a thunderstorm.

3. Case Studies: Notion AI and Superhuman

a. Notion AI's Pre-Launch Strategy

Tamara highlights Notion's successful demand seeding approach when launching Notion AI. Instead of a traditional launch, Notion employed a viral waitlist strategy that gamified the sign-up process.

Tamara Graminski [05:10]:
"They gamified access. You’d sign up for the waitlist and see your spot. If you referred others, you could move up the waitlist. This created urgency, FOMO, and encouraged word-of-mouth promotion."

Key Elements of Notion's Strategy:

• Viral Waitlist: Users could improve their waitlist position by referring others, fostering organic growth.
• Psychological Drivers:
  • Scarcity: Limited early access heightened the perceived value.
  • Social Proof: A large waitlist signaled popularity and desirability.
  • Gamification: Users actively participated in advancing their position, increasing engagement.
• Outcomes: The strategy generated substantial free press and viral buzz, ensuring a highly anticipated launch.

Tamara Graminski [07:11]:
"Launching around something relevant, like AI, added contextual importance. Additionally, leveraging superfans accelerated initial sign-ups."

b. Superhuman's Exclusive Launch Approach

Superhuman, an email application, adopted a distinct demand seeding method focused on exclusivity and personalized onboarding.

Tamara Graminski [08:30]:
"They had an invite-only waitlist with over 275,000 sign-ups. Access required a 30-minute one-on-one onboarding call, making each spot feel like a coveted opportunity."

Key Features of Superhuman's Strategy:

• High Exclusivity: Limited access created a sense of prestige and desirability.
• Personalized Onboarding: The mandatory onboarding call ensured users were genuinely interested and invested.
• Revenue Generation: Despite being a $30 product in a free-dominated market, Superhuman achieved $18 million in revenue by 2021 through this strategy.
• Customer Retention: Early users felt privileged, fostering loyalty and positive word-of-mouth.

Tamara Graminski [10:10]:
"The 30-minute call wasn't about scaling but about demonstrating value and collecting feedback, which translated into real revenue."

4. Actionable Strategies for Marketers

Drawing from the discussed case studies, Tamara presents three actionable strategies to implement demand seeding effectively:

a. Find Your True Fans

Identify and engage with your superfans—individuals who are already enthusiastic about your brand or product.

Tamara Graminski [11:10]:
"Don’t wait for launch to get people excited. Tap into those who are already excited today. Give them behind-the-scenes access and make them feel like insiders."

Implementation Tips:

• Engage existing customers through exclusive previews or beta testing.
• Solicit feedback to make superfans feel valued and involved.

b. Build in Public

Adopt transparency by sharing your product's development journey, sneak peeks, and progress updates.

Tamara Graminski [11:10]:
"Tease progress and involve your audience, even the non-superfans. When people feel connected to your story, they're more likely to engage on launch day."

Benefits:

• Enhances connection and investment from the audience.
• Encourages organic sharing and word-of-mouth promotion.

c. Play with Scarcity and Exclusivity

Create limited access or VIP opportunities to heighten interest and urgency.

Tamara Graminski [11:10]:
"Create a reason for people to want in early. Maybe they get VIP perks or access to something everyone else wants. Position the launch as an opportunity, not just a product release."

Strategies:

• Implement time-bound offers or limited edition releases.
• Offer exclusive content or features to early adopters.

5. Conclusion

In this insightful episode, Daniel Murray and Tamara Graminski delve deep into the nuances of demand seeding as a pivotal GTM strategy. By examining the successful launches of Notion AI and Superhuman, listeners gain a comprehensive understanding of how anticipation, exclusivity, and genuine engagement can transform a product launch from ordinary to extraordinary. The actionable strategies provided empower marketers to craft their own demand seeding campaigns, ensuring they don't just launch a product but do so with a prepared and eager audience ready to embrace it.

Daniel Murray [12:44]:
"If you're launching a product soon, don't just wait to build demand on the day of the launch. Demand seed."

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Final Thoughts:
"Go-to-Market Plays #1: When To Do a Launch" serves as a valuable resource for marketers aiming to refine their product launch strategies. By emphasizing the importance of early engagement and strategic planning, the episode equips listeners with the knowledge to achieve more impactful and successful market introductions.

For more insights and actionable marketing strategies, tune into upcoming episodes of The Marketing Millennials podcast.

Transcript

[A]

What is up, marketing besties? We are kicking off a brand new mini series called Go to Marketplace where we break down one go to market move in under 10 minutes. Real tactics, zero fluff, just the kind of stuff you actually use to launch smarter, grow faster and win your market. And joining me for this whole series is someone who lives and breathes Go to Market, Tamara Graminski. She's an award winning product marketer, former VP of Product marketing at Kajabi, and one of the sharpest minds in the game. Let's get into it. Tamara, welcome to the market, Millennials.

[B]

Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. As you mentioned, it's so important to actually break marketing down into tangible little bits that we can execute. I've spent more than 10 years deep in the world of product marketing and go to market with both startups and scale ups. And I keep seeing the same thing happening over and over, which is as marketers, we just overcomplicate everything. We spend months planning these big strategies and because of that, we often miss the, like, small bite size opportunities right in front of us. And so I love the idea of giving marketers simple, actionable plays that they can use, like starting tomorrow in their job. And today I think I'm pretty excited because we're going to kick off the series with one of my favorite underrated go to market moves, which is planting the seed before you launch your product.

[A]

A lot of marketers actually think that launch starts on launch day, but if there's one thing I've learned from Tamara and product marketers out there, the best launches don't start when you hit publish. They start months and months before.

[B]

Totally. And we're not talking about just like the planning process internally, but if you actually wait until launch day to start building awareness with your audience, whether that's your existing customers or prospects, you're already behind. Right? You're basically starting from zero. But if you start planting the right seeds early, and we're going to talk about a few ways you can do that, then on launch day it almost feels inevitable. You have people waiting, you have people excited, and there's a lot of hype. So today I want to break down for you what demand seeding is. I want to give you a few examples specifically of Notion and Superhuman and how they used it to drive success. And then I want to give our listeners three things that they can do to implement it themselves. Does that sound good?

[A]

Yeah, let's get into it. So let's just start with the basics. When we Talk about demand seeding. What does that actually mean?

[B]

It sounds overly fancy. But what I mean is for most of us, when we think about launching a product, we, we're launching it to like a very cold audience. They have no idea that we're building this. They have no idea that we're launching this. Demand seating is the opposite. Think about having a wait list of people who've already raised their hand. They're dying to try it, they're ready to give you their money. So it's really the art of creating anticipation, exclusivity and curiosity. And there's a massive opportunity to educate along the way. And so if you think like the average launch, we kind of like flip a switch and we're like, great, we're live, come and buy us now. The best go to market. When you implement this kind of demand seeding is more of like rolling thunder. I think I've talked to you about rolling thunder before and it's this idea of like, okay, like a thunderstorm on the horizon, you hear a little bit of thunder coming in. And then as launch day gets closer, it gets louder and louder. Launch day, it's like you're right in the storm, right? You have all your channels activated and then after launch day, the storm keeps happening because the storm is now moving away. So it starts to kind of decrease again. So that's kind of the concept of demand seeding.

[A]

Yeah, I love that. And I also think that a lot of people wait way too long for that launch day and put so much expectation on one day. And this allows you to not put that expectation on just one, one day. There's a lot of moments in time that are before and after. So you're not only relying on that one launch. So this is not starting from zero on launch day, which a lot of people and a lot of brands, they just start from zero on launch day, no less. No anything.

[B]

That's exactly it. You're basically like priming demand. And as you mentioned, because you have these mini touch points ahead of time, you can actually even start to have higher fidelity forecasts about what your launch results might be. Because you're testing engagement, you're testing value propositions, you're adjusting those throughout all of these like micro moments during demand seeding.

[A]

I want to go into some examples. And you talked about one example you wanted to talk about at the beginning and that's notion. And notion had one of the best pre launch strategies with notion AI. Can you walk us through what notion did that was so awesome.

[B]

So demand seeding works not just for when you're launching like a company or a whole new product line. It can also be for, like a feature set. And Notion is a great example of that. So when Notion launched Notion AI, they had a very, very smart wait list strategy. So what they did was they basically engineered anticipation and they created a viral wait list. So instead of letting people just sign up, what they did was they gamified access. So you would go to the landing page, you would sign up for the waitlist. That kind of gave you your spot in line. And it would literally even tell you on the waitlist landing page what spot you were. But if you referred others to also join the waitlist, so I was like, daniel, come join the waitlist for Notion AI. It looks awesome. Then I would get bumped up higher in the waitlist. And so I was incentivized to share with others, which meant there was a lot of, like, free word of mouth generated on social. People were talking about this and so there's this idea of like, built in urgency and this idea of like FOMO, right? So I can see, wow, 100,000 people have signed up for the wait list. It must be important. Like, I must want to be on it as well. So as I mentioned, it turned into a bunch of press, free press for them, free word of mouth. And it worked because it tapped into like three powerful psychological drivers. The first one was scarcity, right? Not everyone gets it right away. And so if you want it, you need to earn it. The second one was social proof, as I mentioned. I could see, like, when I joined, I think I was like 122,000 on the wait list. So I was like, wow, if that many people are ahead of me, it must be good. And then this idea of gamification, as I mentioned, or like game mechanics, which is, wow. I actually, I'm not just sitting here like a sitting duck waiting for them to choose me. There's something I can do to get ahead. And so when Notion started opening up these waitlist spots, it felt like an event. People were like going crazy for it rather than just like a feature drop.

[A]

I also think two things that I would add to this Notion launches. I think when you do launches around things that are happening, like AI, that also brings a little bit of relevancy into this launch because I think relevancy pays a lot of parts of launches if you can launch something around something that's happening in the world today. So I think Notion AI did that. And also, I don't know, I. I don't know the exact mechanics, but I bet Notion already has a lot of super fans that they tapped in to be on this list as well. And utilizing super fans also can help drive that that those numbers up at the beginning. So I think those are two things that I would add. And I know we want to also get into another cool example, Superhuman. And if you don't know Superhuman, it's the email app. But people could not wait to get into Superhuman. It was kind of crazy. I remember so many people trying to put in their email, they were begging to be a part of the Superhuman app or whatever you want to call it, software. So what was their go to market play? Superhuman.

[B]

Totally. So they also went with this idea of demand seating, but they took a slightly different approach than Notion. So they really played on the idea of exclusivity. And this was a slightly different example because this was the launch of the whole company, not just the launch of a feature set. So that's why I like contrasting both of these. So they made people wait to get access and not just wait, but they made people really, really, really want it. There was three components to this strategy. The first one was similar to Notion. They had an invite only wait list. There's over 275,000 people on the waitlist, which is massive for like an email app. And it had a $30 price point. You got to think most people today use email for free, like a Gmail. But you got all these people to raise their hand to say, yeah, I want to pay and I'll wait to do it. The second thing though, that was really cool is for the waitlist, they didn't just open the doors. What they did was if it was your turn on the waitlist, they would offer you a 30 minute, one on one onboarding. And you had to go through this onboarding call to get off the wait list. And so this allowed them to position their product, but it also meant that when your slot came, you really cared about capturing it. And they offered 100 spots a week. And so if you passed up your spot, you weren't going to get another one. So it kind of felt like winning a golden ticket if you were selected to have your onboarding call.

[A]

And you know what is crazy about what you just said is that you had to do a 30 minute call. And a lot of people would think this is very counterintuitive, that you have to put another barrier for someone to get in your product.

[B]

And this wasn't an enterprise product either, right? It was $30. So the reason they did. It was, I wanted to walk people through the actual value of the product. They wanted to collect feedback and almost onboard them on the call. And again, they were applying into exclusivity. This wasn't meant to scale, was like meant to be the opposite of it. But it did work. The strategy turned into real revenue. So they launched this wait list in 2020 and by 2021 they had $18 million in revenue. So I think it was a pretty smart move.

[A]

Yeah, it, it seems to work and people still seem to love the product. So it definitely they had a retention towards this because now people feel like they're early users of the product and they can claim they were early to the product. So I think that's pretty cool. But I want to know what can marketers take away from these launches? Like how do I take these strategies and apply them to my own launch if I'm going to launch a product today or a feature today?

[B]

Great question. So you don't need to work at a massive company like Notion or Superhuman to do demand seating. There's basically three go to market moves we can steal from this play. The first one, and I feel like you teed me up for this one earlier, is find your true fans. Find those super fans. Don't wait for launch to get people excited. Tap into the people who are already excited about you today, whether that's existing customers or just people in the market who are stoked about what you're building. These early adopters desperately want your product before it even exists. So give them behind the scenes access, ask for feedback like Superhuman did and make them feel like insiders. So that's the first thing. Second thing is build in public. This is becoming a really popular trend now. But tease, progress, share sneak peeks and involve your audience, even the non superfans. Because when people feel connected to your story, they feel bought into the story. They're much more likely to engage with you and your product on launch day. Right. Or like what we saw with notion, even just spread the word for you. And then the third play, and I think this is a totally underrated play in B2B, is to play with scarcity and exclusivity. If everyone thinks that everything is available to everyone, it's boring. No one wants it. So you want to create a reason for people to want in early. Maybe they get some sort of VIP perks. Maybe they get access to something that everyone else wants. Whatever it is, you want to position that launch or that access like an opportunity, not just like a product launch.

[A]

Thank you Tamara. Today we went over demand seeding, so this is one step in our Go to Marketplace series. So if you're launching a product soon, don't just wait to build demand on the day of the product of the launch. Demand Seed. Thank you Tamara for this episode. Thank you for coming with some actual actionable tips and actionable examples from people doing it. And until next week, see you next time. Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.