Surpassed Launch Goals with a Momentum-Building Product Launch Plan

This case study was created from an episode of the Product Marketing Adventures Podcast. It has been adapted into Dusted's case study format to preserve and showcase the guest's real-world experience. Written to preserve the voice of the true author, Natalie Marcotullio.

At Navattic we create shareable product experiences that let buyers get hands-on earlier in the journey—try-before-you-buy for software. We had primarily sold to marketers and product marketers. For about nine months we had been building Launchpad, a custom-made solution for solution engineers (SEs). We already had some SE users and beta customers, but we had not yet done a public, splashy launch to make both our existing customers and the broader SE audience aware that we now served this use case.

We needed to break into the solution-engineering ICP with a product purpose-built for them. The old playbook of simply shipping a feature checklist would not work; we had to earn trust from scratch, prove we understood their day-to-day pain, and tell a memorable story rather than just announce “we have a new product.” Because Launchpad was not universally applicable to every customer, we also had to carefully segment our base so the right people received the right message and offer without wasting effort on poor-fit accounts.

We followed a six-step playbook instead of jumping straight to channels.

1. Research – I interviewed our founder (a former SE) on why Navattic was created and the original SE pain, and we listened to customer interviews focused on current-state frustrations rather than pitching the product.
2. Messaging framework – We built two tables (persona-based across the full buying group—user, champion, decision-maker—and use-case-specific) filled with direct customer quotes on “what’s broken today” plus product differentiation from our SMEs. We aligned the draft with sales, CS, and the founder.
3. Enablement – We created a single enablement doc that led with the founder-origin story, clarified who the product was (and was not) for, included messaging, quotes, and interactive demos, then turned the whole thing into a custom GPT so the team could chat with the messaging instead of reading a long doc. This became standard for every tier-one launch.
4. Segmentation – Working sessions with our head of CS, sales, and the founder produced signals (firmographics, technographics, hiring of SEs/sales, multi-product orgs, existing tech that might already solve the problem). We scored accounts 1–5 in Clay, output a master sheet of tiers A–E, and pre-mapped messaging and offers to each tier so inbound hand-offs were instant.
5. Tiered product content – Top-tier (A/B) accounts received highly personalized 1:1 interactive demos built with Launchpad itself; lower tiers received a lighter overview demo built in our core product.
6. Phased launch – We teed up the story with a LinkedIn campaign (and advisor amplification) that generated early inbound, then ran tiered email (CEO-personalized for tier A, still-personalized for B, newsletter for C–E), in-app messaging, and a webinar. Post-launch we shifted to ongoing SE presence via conferences, partnerships, and co-content.

• GetWhys for synthesizing customer and SME interview insights straight into messaging tables
• Clay for the scored account table (yes/no signals rolled into 1–5 overall scores and tiers)
• Monster Google Sheet that linked every cohort back to the enablement doc, messaging, and offer
• Custom GPT cloned from the enablement doc for internal self-serve messaging
• Navattic / Launchpad interactive demos (personalized 1:1 versions for top tiers)
• Notion for the multi-channel launch calendar
• Slack channel that surfaced every high-engagement demo completion for real-time internal celebration
• Loop & Tie for the campaign’s sustainable gifting component

The integrated campaign delivered a 57% email open rate. Thirty percent of the target audience we sent the interactive demo to actually engaged and went hands-on with the new product—strong penetration for a SaaS launch. The LinkedIn tease alone produced early inbound. Internally the Slack demo-engagement feed kept energy high, and the custom GPT measurably improved on-brand email quality from other teams, cutting downstream editing time. The heavy upfront alignment made content creation and execution dramatically faster than previous launches that had skipped research and messaging.