Launch a product or feature

A launch needs a goal before it needs any copy, because the goal decides who you're talking to and what you ask them to do. Kite asks what the launch is for and proposes a goal you can measure, such as trial signups from new visitors, upgrades from existing customers, or demo requests from a particular kind of company.

Kite also helps you size the launch. A new product deserves a launch page, a full announcement, an email to your whole list, and several days of social posts. A smaller feature might only need an email to the customers who'll use it, a short post, and an update to an existing page. Kite recommends a size based on how much the change matters to your customers and how it compares with what your competitors offer.

Say you run an invoicing app and you're shipping recurring invoices in three weeks. Kite might suggest two goals: get existing customers who send the same invoice every month to turn the feature on, and bring in new signups from freelancers searching for recurring billing. Those two audiences need different messages, so Kite plans a customer email for the first and a launch page and social posts for the second.

Yes. Kite writes the launch positioning and messaging first, because every other piece of the launch is built from it. The positioning explains who the new product or feature is for, what problem it solves for them, and why it's better than how they handle that problem today.

To write it, Kite uses the research in your team's knowledge base. It knows your existing positioning and brand voice, how your customers describe their problems, and how your competitors describe similar products. It can look at competitors' current ads and landing pages to see which claims are already crowded, so your launch says something they don't. If a competitor already announced something similar, Kite finds that too and adjusts the angle.

The result is a short messaging document: a headline, the one-sentence explanation of what you're launching, the main benefits, and the proof behind each one. You review it and change anything that doesn't sound right. Once you approve it, Kite uses it as the source for the page, the announcement, the emails, and the posts, which is what keeps them consistent.

The launch page is where every announcement, email, and post sends people, so Kite builds it to turn those visits into the goal you set. On a website Kite hosts, it builds the page from your site's own sections and brand, writes the copy from the approved messaging, creates the images, and adds the form or call to action the goal calls for. Each page gets a title, a description, a share image, and structured data, so it looks right when people share it and when search engines find it.

A launch usually touches more than one page. Kite can also update your homepage, pricing page, navigation, or product pages to mention what's new, and add links from related articles to the launch page. These changes wait on your site as unpublished changes until launch day. You can preview each one beforehand, and none of them go live until you publish.

If your website runs on Webflow, Contentful, Sanity, Storyblok, or self-hosted Payload, Kite makes the changes through your connected account. If your site lives in a GitHub repository, Kite can work on it there too.

Kite writes each launch message for the place it will appear, rather than pasting the same paragraph everywhere. They all come from the same approved messaging, so a reader who sees the email and then the LinkedIn post gets the same story told two ways.

A typical launch includes:

• An announcement post. A blog post or article that explains what you launched, who it's for, and how to start using it, published on your website.
• A customer email. An email to the customers most likely to care, such as the ones whose usage suggests they need the feature. In Mailchimp, Kite creates the campaign, picks the audience or segment, writes the email, sends you a test, and schedules it for launch morning once you approve.
• Notes to prospects. For a product aimed at new customers, Kite can build a list of people at companies that match your ideal customer and write each of them a short, personal note about the launch, sent from your team's Kite email address.
• Social posts. Kite writes a few posts per channel, each built around one idea from the launch, such as the problem, a before-and-after, or a customer quote. A launch with three angles gets three posts instead of one long one.
• Images and a launch video. Kite creates on-brand images for the page, email, and posts. It can also make a short vertical video for social media or a longer launch film, using your own product screenshots and footage first.

For LinkedIn, Kite writes the posts for your company page and for the founder or teammate whose name will be on them, in each person's own voice. The author approves their post in Kite and shares it on LinkedIn. For other social channels, Kite publishes through your connected accounts once you approve, then sends you the link to each live post.

A launch gets the most attention when everything appears at once, so Kite prepares every piece ahead of time and gives you one clear list to approve on the day. The website changes are already waiting as unpublished changes, the customer email is already scheduled, and the social posts are already written with a suggested time for each.

When you publish the website changes, Kite shows you the full list of what will go live, publishes them together, and checks that the site displays correctly. Shortly afterward, it checks the new pages' speed, search basics, and structured data, and tells you if anything needs fixing. You can undo any single change without losing the others.

Launch dates move. If yours slips, the website changes simply stay unpublished, and Kite can unschedule the Mailchimp email and reschedule it for the new date. Nothing goes out early because a date changed.

A launch worked if it moved the goal you set before it started, so Kite measures the launch against that goal rather than against raw traffic. It compares the launch period with the period before it and reports what changed.

Kite reads the results from wherever they live:

• Your website. On a site Kite hosts, its built-in analytics show visitors to the launch page, where they came from, and how many submitted the form or clicked the call to action. If your site is measured in Google Analytics, Kite reads the same information there, including a realtime report while the launch is going out.
• Your email. Kite reads the customer email's opens, clicks, and unsubscribes in Mailchimp, along with delivery and replies for the notes it sent to prospects.
• Your social posts. Kite reads your LinkedIn company page's impressions, clicks, reactions, and follower count, and the engagement on posts it published to other channels.
• Your product. If your product records events in PostHog, Kite can follow new signups and other events after the launch, so you can see whether the attention turned into use.

The report connects each result to the work behind it. It might show that the customer email drove most of the feature adoption while the social posts brought in most of the new signups. Kite then suggests what to do next, such as a second email to customers who didn't open the first one or a follow-up post built on the angle that performed best. It saves what it learned in your team's knowledge base, so your next launch starts from what worked for this one.