How Mailchimp VP of PM prepares for Product Launch — Darcy Kurtz // Mailchimp

Quotes

• “Product launches don’t start once the product is close to being ready. It actually starts at the ideation stage.” - Darcy“Mailchimp is of the thought that It doesn’t matter where you are in the process, you can always be thinking about talking to customers and thinking about marketing from the second you have an idea.” - Darcy“I think the research phase is at least half the battle when you’re getting out to do a launch.” - Ben “The success or failure of your product is less about just pure marketing. It’s about what people really want and how you package it in a relevant way that people will know it will solve their problem.” - Darcy“In Mailchimp we have 12 million users but all of them might be using the product for different things so we have to personalize it by industry and start building out the relevant messaging and positioning for each.” - Darcy“Spending a quality time with the front, to get your messaging and positioning really tight can make all the downstream things much easier.”  - Darcy“If you are going to actually take the time to brand your new product, you better be willing to put the money and effort behind to build that brand versus leveraging a brand that you already have and descriptively naming it.” - Darcy“The advice I give to podcasters all of the time is don’t name the podcast after yourself because people aren’t looking for you. Name the podcast after what you are going to talk about.” - Ben“There are a couple of ways to approach naming and branding and one of the tools I used is called PickyDomains (no affiliation with MarTech) and it’s a crowdsourcing service.” - Ben“Think through what an integrated launch campaign looks like. There is no one channel that you should use to get your word out. You are going to boost your sponsor rates and conversions significantly with every channel that you add.” - Darcy  “Start building a creative construct that you can use in all of your channels so it looks and feel like they are in the same campaign and manage the messaging across them based on what the actual is and that should give you the most bang for the buck.” - Darcy “Having a central resource to look at and take something and basically be just editing instead of creating constantly is a really valuable thing.” - Ben