Writing the perfect launch blog post

Today, I'm going to teach you how to write a great launch blog post. It's something we all do, and don't lie, you probably use AI to help you these days. The problem is that even after you've stripped out all the dumb emoji, emdashes, and line separators, AI-generated blog posts all do this one thing consistently and it drives me insane. They all bury the lede.

Looking back on my year at Supabase, we launched a lot of things. Which means we wrote a lot of launch blog posts. As a team, we've become pretty good at the whole launch process. Launches start with product, of course. But the blog post is the guide that we use to align everyone around messaging and go-to-market.

You've probably seen the blog post that buries the lede. That's a phrase that we use a lot, and of course it comes from journalism. The lede is the core part of the story. And when you bury the lede, you supress the impact of your post by hiding it among a number of extraneous etails. In so doing, you risk falling prey to the attention span of the modern consumer. When they read your blog post, they want to know what it's about and why they should keep reading. If they don't get it, they bounce.

Don't be a recipe blogger

A lot of tech launch posts begin with a long dissertation about the problem. It's the nerd equivalent of those recipes where someone tells you about their grandmother, their trip to Tuscany, the car they rented, the camel they saw on the road in Morocco, and how their spaghetti and meatballs is the perfect blend of Tuscany and Morocco in one dish.

Nobody cares. Get me to the recipe.

Here's the tenth and final blog post we published in a launch week series. Notice the first sentence. It starts with: "Today, we're launching…" and it tells you the name of the product and what precisely it is.

Now, I get it. I'm a writer, too. (Don't forget to buy my best selling book, and sign up to be the first to hear about my upcoming novel!) I love words. I love to write words, I love to read words, I love to listen to words. I'm a nerd for words.

It takes all the discipline I have to write good ledes. But as much as I love long passages of interiority in my own work, they really have no place in the opening of your launch blog post.

The anatomy of a great launch post

Start with the perfect lede:

• What are you announcing today?
• What is its name?
• What does it do?
• Who is it for?

The second paragraph is where you can talk about the problem. You can talk about the background. You can talk about the history of the problem. If it's a particularly gnarly problem, and it happens to be core to the positioning and messaging of your company, this is a great opportunity for you to establish yourself as both understanding the problem and having the credibility to solve it. In fact, if it's a very complex problem, demonstrating that you know the history of (attempted) solutions gives you a moral authority to then talk about the future: your product.

Then bring it back to what you're announcing and go deeper, perhaps including availability and pricing.

Below the fold

Borrowing another term from journalism, below the fold or below the opening 1 to 4 paragraphs, is where you get into more detail about the product. Now I love to start here with how it works. Show me screenshots. Show me step-by-step instructions. Show me how easy it is to use. Show me how powerful it is. Show me what the product is in all of its detail.

The age old question about this section is should this information be in your documentation or should it be in the blog post? Docs are for detailed information. Use the blog post to highlight the easy to use or lighthouse scenario. It's the equivalent of underlining the information that's in your documentation.

And then, if the product or feature that you're shipping is a major technical accomplishment, you can use the next section to go into how you built it. Get into gory implementation details, design considerations and trade offs, and customer research. Developers love to know this information.

In the next section, I like to highlight customers that are using the product. Now, if these customers are particularly impressive, you may want to pull up excerpts about the customer into the opening. But at least here in the bottom, you have a great opportunity to get into the type of people who are using it today. The benefits they're seeing from using it today. The plans they have to continue to use it or to expand usage of it in the future. This is not only social proof, but it's also an opportunity to relate your feature to the reader and enable them to enter this world of what it's like to use your product.

Close well

And finally, with the last section of your blog post, you want to have a clear call to action. Explain to the customer how they can get started, and show them the steps required to either sign up or start using your product. Point them to community resources where they can ask additional questions. Point them to your documentation where they can go into more detail. Embed YouTube videos of the product in action. This is a great spot to just wrap everything up and give customers a clear next step.

Don't forget to cover pricing and availability. If this is an early release feature and people need to sign up make sure there's a link to the form that they can use to sign up. If they've read this far, they want to use your product. Don't leave them hanging.

Summary

Launch blog posts are not complicated to write. But you'd be surprised how many people screw them up. Just go read 10 tech launch blog posts right now. I guarantee you that at least five of them have buried the lede.

For more information on Launch blog posts, how to run product launches themselves, how to run launch events, and how to launch your career, read my best selling book. Picks and Shovels is available now.