Forem: launchweek.dev

How to launch week: Raycast

fmerian — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 12:37:00 +0000

Raycast is an app that provides developers with quick access to their tools.

It reduces context switching with a command line inspired interface and connects with GitHub, Linear, and G Suite among others.

The company ran a launch week in July 2022.

Below are some key takeaways — an overview of what and how Raycast shipped this week.

tldr

Announce your launch week in advance to raise awareness and start building momentum
Launch on more places like Product Hunt and Hacker News to maximize the compound effect
Post a recap to keep the momentum going.

how Raycast launched

Announcements
Results
Key takeaways

announcements

Raycast made five announcements:

Community Stories
Look and feel
Raycast for Teams
Menu Bar Comments
Community Swag

For the announcements, Raycast applied these tactics:

Publish a preview 1 week in advance
Publish 1 changelog post
Publish 4 blog posts — including a recap
Spread the news on Twitter/X
Launched on Product Hunt and Hacker News

results

Day 0 — Jul 11, 2022 — Preview

Prior to the launch week, Raycast posted a preview on socials to start building momentum. — View post on X

Likes: 300
Reposts: 26

Day 1 — Jul 18, 2022 - Community Stories

Likes: 141
Reposts: 28

Day 2 - Jul 19, 2022 - Look and feel

Likes: 435
Reposts: 41

// Raycast announced this update in a blog post and release note. They also dropped a preview — View post on X

Day 3 - Jul 20, 2022 - Raycast for Teams

Likes: 249
Reposts: 36

// Raycast announced Raycast for Teams in a blog post. They also launched on Product Hunt, and ranked #4 Product of the Day.

Day 4 — Jul 21, 2022 — Menu Bar Commands

Likes: 249
Reposts: 36

// Raycast published a technical behind-the-scenes post and submitted it on Hacker News.

Day 5 — Jul 22, 2022 — Community Swag

Likes: 197
Reposts: 182

keep momentum

To wrap up this launch week, Raycast also published a recap on their blog — and reposted it on socials — View post on X

key takeaways

Some learnings from this launch week:

Announce your launch week in advance to raise awareness and start building momentum. Raycast started 1 week in advance.
Launch on more places like Product Hunt and Hacker News to maximize the compound effect.
Post a recap of your announcements to keep the momentum going. This could still reach people who either forgot, ignored, or missed them the first time.

That's a wrap!

Follow @launchweekdev on X for more insights.

We're tracking launch weeks across the industry for product discovery and inspiration.

Frequently asked questions on launch weeks

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Dec 27 '24

#startup #showdev #devjournal #ama

Planning a launch week? Launch on Product Hunt, too.

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Mar 17

#startup #devjournal

How to launch week: Bucket

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Mar 25

#showdev #startup #tooling #featureflags

How to launch week: Bucket

fmerian — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:55:52 +0000

Bucket is a feature flagging tool for SaaS companies.

The company had its first-ever launch week in March 2025.

Below are some key takeaways — an overview of what and how Bucket launched.

tldr

Announce your launch week in advance to raise awareness and start building momentum
Launch on more places like Product Hunt to maximize the compound effect
Pull in customers and partners as much as possible

how Bucket launched

Announcements
Results
Key takeaways

announcements

Bucket made five announcements, introducing:

CLI
Toolbar
Event log
GitHub integration
Revamped docs

For the announcements, they applied three tactics:

Published release notes
Published posts on Twitter/X, Bluesky and LinkedIn
Launched on Product Hunt

How we launch

fmerian for Bucket.co ・ Mar 12

#devjournal #startup

results

Day 0 — Feb 28, 2025 — Preview

Likes: 23
Reposts: 7
Impressions: 1,856

Day 1 - Mar 17, 2025 — CLI

Likes: 6
Reposts: 6
Impressions: 1,455

Day 2 - Mar 18, 2025 — Toolbar

Likes: 6
Reposts: 5
Impressions: 772

// On Day 2, Bucket also launched on Product Hunt. They did a "Battle Royale" with Tinybird, an open-source analytics platform.

Day 3 - Mar 19, 2025 — Event log

Likes: 2
Reposts: 2
Impressions: 246

Day 4 - Mar 20, 2025 — GitHub integration

Likes: 7
Reposts: 6
Impressions: 1,684

Day 5 - Mar 21, 2025 — Revamped docs

Likes: 8
Reposts: 3
Impressions: 535

key takeaways

Some learnings from this launch week:

Announce your launch week in advance to raise awareness and start building momentum.
Launch on more places like Product Hunt to maximize the compound effect.
Pull in customers and partners as much as possible. Bucket may have reached this level of engagement because it collaborated with Tinybird and GitBook.

Planning a launch week? Launch on Product Hunt, too.

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Mar 17

#startup #devjournal

That's a wrap!

Follow @launchweekdev on X for more insights.

We're tracking launch weeks across the industry for product discovery and inspiration.

Planning a launch week? Launch on Product Hunt, too.

fmerian — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 17:43:32 +0000

Launch weeks are high peaks (…) They create buzz and excitement around the product.

— Zeno Rocha, Co-founder and CEO of Resend on How we keep momentum at Resend

Zeno '@zenorocha' Rocha puts it simply: launch weeks are high peaks. So, you may want to maximize the compound effect and launch on places like Product Hunt, too.

why it's important

Product Hunt definitely is a great place to launch on launch week — a place where many developer-first products launched successfully during their launch weeks: Supabase, Inkeep, and Raycast, to name a few. ¹

According to similarweb.com, it gets 4.8 million unique visitors every month, and according to Ahrefs, it has a domain rating of 91.

Launching on Product Hunt keeps reminding you that your company exists and you're making progress. You stay top-of-mind, and in the context of a launch week, you can keep it really simple.

keep it simple

FYI Below are the required inputs to submit a new product on Product Hunt. You can find them here on GitHub to get started.

Name of the product: the name of your product in 40 characters or less
Tagline: a concise, descriptive tagline in 60 characters max
Product description: a short description of what the product does in less than 260 characters
Launch tags: Up to three tags — Browse full list here
Thumbnail: a 240 x 240 pixel thumbnail
Image gallery: 2 to 8 images to show the product

There's a high chance that you've worked on these elements for your launch week. Don't overthink it and reuse 'em all.

The anatomy of a launch plan

fmerian ・ Jul 3 '24

#startup #developer #marketing #devjournal

wrapping up

When planning a launch week, think compound effect. You'll reach a high level of attention. Fully leverage it by launching in more places when it makes sense, like Product Hunt.

Enjoy your launch week, and keep launching!

Supabase launched Supabase UI on Product Hunt during Supabase Launch Week I and ranked #1 Product of the Day and #2 Product of the Week. So did Inkeep, ranked #3 Product of the Day, and Raycast with Raycast for Teams, ranked #4 Product of the Day. ↩

How to launch week: Dub

fmerian — Sun, 02 Feb 2025 14:40:40 +0000

Dub is an open-source link management platform.

The company had its first-ever launch week in January 2025.

Below are some key takeaways — an overview of how and what Dub shipped this week.

tldr

A launch week doesn't have to last 5 days.
Day 1 may have the highest impact in terms of social engagement.
Related: Pull in customers and partners as much as possible.

how Dub launched

announcements

Dub made three announcements, itnroducing:

For the announcements, Dub mostly applied two tactics:

Publish one announcement per day on their blog
Spread the news on Twitter/X

results

Day 1 - Jan 14, 2025 — Dub Conversions

Likes: 493
Reposts: 70
Impressions: 155K

Day 2 - Jan 15, 2025 — Dub Webhooks

Likes: 35
Reposts: 11
Impressions: 10K

Day 3 - Jan 16, 2025 — Dub's new About page

Likes: 11
Reposts: 1
Impressions: 2K

// Dub had a different approach on Day 3 and quoted their founder's original post.

keeping momentum

To wrap up this launch week, Dub also published a recap on their blog — and reposted it on their socials.

key takeaways

Some learnings from this launch week:

If we define launch weeks as a week of announcing new features, they don't have to last 5 days though. Dub's launch week lasted 3 days.
Day 1 had the most impact on social engagement, and Dub crushed it with 143.7K impressions.
Related: Pull in customers and partners as much as possible. Dub may have reached this level of engagement because it featured partners like Stripe, Clerk, and Supabase.
Post a recap of your announcements to keep the momentum going. This is good for SEO, and it could still reach people who either forgot, ignored, or missed them the first time.

That's a wrap!

Follow @launchweekdev on X for more insights.

We're tracking launch weeks across the industry for product discovery and inspiration.

Frequently asked questions on launch weeks

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Dec 27 '24

#startup #showdev #devjournal #ama

How to launch week: Bucket

fmerian for launchweek.dev ・ Mar 25

#showdev #startup #tooling #featureflags

366 days of launch weeks

fmerian — Mon, 30 Dec 2024 15:42:00 +0000

As we're wrapping up this year, below are some numbers from 2024.

the year of launch weeks

Last year, we tracked 47 launch weeks run by 38 different companies.

In 2024, we tracked 126 launch weeks run by 94 different companies. In comparison, that’s 79 more launch weeks (+168.1%) and 56 more companies (+147.4%).

Running a launch week has a “cost” for one company — if many experimented with it, few companies managed to do it consistently.

Among the 94 different companies, only 7 companies (7.4%) have run 3 launch weeks or more this year: Highlight, Daytona, Memfault, Mux, Outerbase, Supabase, Wasp.

products of the week

When your team runs a launch week, you are Product Of The Week by default.

If you exclude the Mega Launch Week that featured 22 developer tools (W49), there were exactly 2 launches per week on average.

a week of announcements

We define a launch week as a week of announcing new features.

This year, the shortest launch week lasted 3 days.

The longest? 6 days. It was Unkey's Launch Week.

wrapping up

That's all, folks!

You can find the data source here.

As we're wrapping up this year, we have plans for 2025:

Weekly posts on socials about upcoming launch weeks, insights, and best practices
Weekly newsletter on what dev-first companies announced and what they’ll launch

We're also working on improving product discovery and building comprehensive guides.

Learn more about the vision here.

Make sure to follow us on Twitter/X and Bluesky, and subscribe to get the latest updates on all things launch weeks.

Keep launching!

Frequently asked questions on launch weeks

fmerian — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 16:04:00 +0000

launchweek.dev is an open-source project that tracks launch weeks across the dev tools space — a place for developers to discover great dev-first products and for founders to learn about launch weeks.

We've tracked 185 launch weeks since 2021.

What's a launch week? What's the main objective of a launch week? What types of companies run launch weeks? Do you need to ship a new feature every day during a launch week? Is it an alternative to Product Hunt? How to recover?

Below are answers to frequently asked questions.

what's a launch week?

It's a week where a (dev-first) company announces a new feature every day. See examples here.

what's the main objective of a launch week?

Launch weeks have been great for both aligning the team and getting traction within the community.

— Rory Wilding, COO, Supabase

Launch weeks are high peaks (...) They create buzz and excitement around the product.

— Zeno Rocha, CEO and co-founder, Resend

We did 3 launch weeks in 2024, and each one had a meaningful impact on every aspect of the business. If you're considering ever doing it – do it.

— Brayden Wilmoth, Founder and CTO, Outerbase

what types of companies run launch weeks? Solo makers, early-stage, late-stage?

Both! Take the Mega Launch Week for example — when 22 developer-first companies launched together.

Companies of different sizes participated, from solo makers (KeyHippo) to 100-person teams (Pinecone).

do you need to ship a new feature every day during a launch week?

No. To quote Ant Wilson, CTO of Supabase:

One of our learnings from previous launch weeks was to no longer ship to prod on the day of the launch itself (...) It's ideal to get all the major integrations done a week early.

— Ant Wilson, CTO, Supabase

We define a launch week as a week of announcing new features.

It doesn't have to last 5 days, though — it could last more or less than 5 days.

In 2024, the shortest launch week lasted 3 days. The longest? 6 days. It was Unkey's Launch Week.

is it an alternative to Product Hunt?

No. Product Hunt definitely is a great place to launch dev-first products — a place where many launched successfully: Supabase, Resend, and Warp, to name a few. launchweek.dev is different thought, for three main reasons:

It focuses on the dev tools space
Filtered out by default
Spam-free by design

Learn more here.

how to recover from a launch week?

Start planning the next one.

over to you

Over to you! What would you like to know about launch weeks?

We've tracked 185 launch weeks since 2021.

Ask us anything!

Initial commit

fmerian — Thu, 19 Dec 2024 14:02:07 +0000

I wanted a place for developers to discover awesome dev-first products and for founders to find inspiration.

It started last year as an open collection, a public repository that lists past and upcoming launch weeks — a week where a dev-first company announces a new feature every day.

introducing launchweek.dev

Paul '@kiwicopple' Copplestone, CEO & co-founder of Supabase, reached out later on Twitter/X:

We own launchweek.dev. Perhaps we can repurpose it and use it for the entire dev community?

— Paul Copplestone, CEO & co-founder of Supabase

Four weeks ago, we refreshed the project.

We introduced a new layout, logo, and color theme. We launched social accounts on Twitter/X and Bluesky (follow us) and started a newsletter, too.

People reached out asking:

Is it an alternative to Product Hunt?

That made me think about the future of this project.

this is not another Product Hunt

Product Hunt is a place where I enjoy hanging out, so I'm humbled by the comparison. launchweek.dev is different thought for three main reasons:

It focuses on the dev tools space
Filtered out by default
Spam-free by design

focused on dev tools

First, it focuses on the dev tools space.

Developers are the target audience. Serverless and API-first are frequently used keywords. Usually, this means that the announcements include some code examples. And if you want to add your launch week, there's no submit form — you need to create a pull request.

filtered out by default

Second, featured products are filtered out by default.

Launch weeks are challenging. They create buzz and excitement around the product. They require planning and coordination across the team, too. Running a launch week has a "cost" for one company — if many experimented with it, few companies managed to do it consistently. This year, we tracked 122 launch weeks run by 92 different companies. Only 7 companies have run 3 launch weeks or more this year: Highlight, Supabase, Daytona, Outerbase, Mux, Memfault, Wasp. 7 companies — in the world.

spam-free by design

Third, this place is spam-free by design.

Because launch weeks filter out featured products by default, there’s no need to add an upvote system to find out the best products, no need to hack (read: spam) the system to be Product Of The Week (POTW). Take this year 2024. If you exclude the Mega Launch Week that featured 22 developer tools, there were exactly 2 launches per week on average. When your team runs a launch week, you are POTW by default.

From my perspective, this fundamentally changes the way it works.

Launch weeks are high peaks — 5 announcements in 5 days — the most significant "sign of life," Zeno Rocha said, and they require effort. Launch weeks are so intense. We should celebrate them, not add a layer of stress with competition. launchweek.dev is a place that shines a spotlight on those dev-first companies that run launch weeks, those teams that ship.

looking forward

To wrap up, launchweek.dev is a place for developers to discover great dev-first products and for founders to find inspiration and learn how to run successful launch weeks.

Starting today, I'll maintain the social accounts and post weekly about upcoming launch weeks, insights, and best practices. Every week, you'll get an email on what companies announced the previous week and what companies will launch next. I'm also working on improving product discovery and building comprehensive guides.

Please let me know if you have any expectations. This started as an open-source project and will remain open-source forever — star this repo.

Oh, and one more thing — I couldn't be able to build on this vision without sponsors, and I'm thankful for Supabase's early support. If you want to help and support me, please reach out.

Thank you for your time reading this note. You can follow me @fmerian on Twitter/X. I'm building launchweek.dev in public.

Enjoy your day — and keep launching!