Launching a Google App the Startup Way

Behind-the-Scenes of the Primer App Launch

Our team was small. Our budget was $6,000. Our best investment? A $100 gift certificate to a steakhouse.

This is not how Google launches usually go.

But it made sense for us. Primer, the app we work on, helps people get the skills they need to do innovative marketing. This often means our own users don’t have a lot of resources. So we launched the app like our users would — with creativity, scrappiness, and as little cash as possible.

This is our story.

There’s No Silver Bullet. Only a Lot of Lead Ones.

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz quotes a Netscape engineer on their strategy against a strong competitor: “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”

If you read enough product launch stories, it becomes easy to believe that success depends on a silver bullet — the one thing the team did right. Airbnb’s Craigslist API. The link at the bottom of Hotmail messages. The one strategy or hack or partnership that led to astronomical downloads.

For the Primer launch, we looked for a silver bullet. We didn’t find one.

That’s because the silver bullet is a myth. There’s usually not one thing you can do to turn your product into a success.

Instead, we used a lot of lead ones. We got on social. We wrote content. We ran AdWords. We tapped into communities. We pitched press and newsletters and blogs. We wrote personal emails and had hundreds of one-on-one conversations with people who were interested in Primer.

Not all of these things are scalable — but that’s okay. As Paul Graham notes, “If you have to work hard to delight users when you only have a handful of them, you'll keep doing it when you have a lot.”

Your Team Is a Growth Engine.

On launch day, we organized a friendly competition:

Each Primer team member had a URL to our website tagged with unique Google Analytics parameters. When a user clicked one of these URLs, the responsible team member would get credit.

The prize for whoever brought the most traffic? The $100 steakhouse gift certificate.

We did that for three reasons:

It got every team member personally invested in the product’s growth. It tapped into the team’s diversity and creativity. We’re designers, illustrators, developers, writers, and marketers, each with insider knowledge of a different community. Personal recommendations trump most other forms of marketing. Word of mouth is the second most popular way people discover apps.

It worked better than expected: on launch day, our team was the single largest source of traffic to our site.

Talk with Communities, Not at Them

Building a community is hard. Getting involved with one that already exists is much easier.

For us, this meant three groups:

Primer Testers. While Primer was in beta, we invited roughly 200 people to test the app. But more than testers, they were also our first fans. We worked hard to make them feel valued, from personally troubleshooting stuff to sending occasional emails that gave them a sneak peek into our process. When we launched, these early users helped by sharing the app on social and with their friends.

Startups. From early tests, we knew Primer resonated with startup founders. The app offers tips they can use right away, and the mobile format fits well with their busy schedule. To reach these founders, we submitted Primer to Product Hunt. We went on to reach the top spot on the site, with over 1,500 upvotes and great feedback. And this response also translated into downloads:

Primer appeared on Product Hunt on the day after we launched. It was a significant boost to our growth.

Designers. The final community was designers. We felt that Primer itself was interesting as a design case study. It also offers useful business tips to designers starting their own studios. So we tapped into channels frequented by that community: Designer News, Material Up, Web Design Weekly, and Google Design’s Medium channel.

In all three cases, we kept an eye open for feedback and responded whenever we could. That’s important: Engaging with communities means talking with them, not at them.

Kill Your Darlings for Downloads.

Too often at large companies, different parts of the marketing funnel belong to different teams.

Social media may belong to a PR firm, which prioritizes followers and engagement. The website may belong to a digital shop, which cares most about visits and conversions. And the product belongs to engineers and designers, who want downloads and retention.

They’re all trying to promote the product, but their priorities are different. Which is fine, except that sometimes the best way to optimize the funnel is to eliminate steps altogether.

For example: When Primer launched, we left our social handle out of our comms. This simplified the message. Instead of:

Download the app and also follow us on social.

We were saying:

Just download the app.

Now, this means we’re getting relatively little traffic on social. But that’s okay. The goal is to get people to download the app.