Built With Science · B2C · science-based fitness coaching app
Release new features quietly, and announce only once usage proves them
Founder says it gives cleaner reads than email-hyped launches; no numbers
What they did
What happened
In their words
Scaling Meta Ads from zero to $100K a month — Ethan Ethier, Built With Science
David BarnardYeah, that makes sense. One thing you do that I really love is I think what you called quiet launches. What is that and why do you do that?
Ethan EthierYeah, so this is more on the product side, but what we've noticed is in the past, what we would do is anytime we had a new feature that we wanted to release, we would release it on the app and then we would send an email to all our members, get them excited about it. As a marketer, I'm sure you would want everybody to see this new thing that you're building, but what we've noticed is that this often inflates a lot of the engagement metrics that you obviously want to measure when you launch a new feature.
Ethan EthierSo we've actually taken the opposite approach where we'll roll out a new feature, we won't say anything, and we'll just see how the metrics do on its own. And if there's some signal that, "Okay, this product is working well, it's adding value." Then we'll feel confident enough to launch that out to the public. So it's mainly a choice of how we can learn the best from some of these new releases.
David BarnardDo you also have a pretty good beta tester pool where you're even rolling out some of these experiments in beta before they even go out to the main app?
David BarnardSo with those quiet launches, how often are those quiet launches just to the beta pool or do you tell the beta pool, make sure the feature actually works and doesn't have bugs and stuff like that, and then the quiet launch is actually public, or how do you do that?
Ethan EthierYeah, so the beta pool is what we're telling them about the feature. We want them to test it, we want feedback, then we're iterating on that feedback, then we're quietly launching it to see if that ... Because the beta pool are the most engaged users. They probably use whatever we put out, but we just want to refine it. From there, we'll release it to the public quietly.
David BarnardWell, and speaking of product launches, I know this year you launched something called Jeremy AI. What is that and how did it go?
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Tags: quiet-launch, beta-testers, feature-validation