The years behind a two-week launch

A few weeks ago, Jen Phan, the co-founder and CEO of Passionfroot, posted the playbook behind her company's $15M Series A announcement. Two weeks of prep, a seventeen-person team, no marketer, and, by her count, 75,000 impressions and 500 comments in the first day, which one of her investors told her was the best-performing founder post across their whole portfolio. The advice in it was very good, and I found myself nodding along:

• Invest in a strong visual.

• Get the voices your audience trusts to do the talking.

• Bring your customers along.

• Make it effortless for your team and your investors to amplify.

• Do press, but don't rely on it.

• Pick your platform and go hard in the first hour.

That’s all solid advice, and you should check out Jen’s full post for more details. On the second read, though, I noticed a discrepancy that piqued my interest. Everything Jen shared is true, but it didn’t take two weeks to build.

Passionfroot’s scroll-stopping launch video was an artifact of an unapologetically bold visual identity their team honed over the previous two years with the support of creative partners.

The relationships with the creators their audience trusts took close to five years of Twitter threads, conversations, and in-person events to build. Jen was regularly highlighting creators on Twitter in the earliest days of Passionfroot, before she had any customers, a personal brand, or any meaningful engagement on the platform.

Bringing customers along was easy because Passionfroot’s onboarding flow invites them into a Slack channel, and the team builds real relationships with them there over months and years.

Their funding feature in TechCrunch was built on top of a relationship with the journalist who wrote about their seed round almost two years earlier.

The engagement on LinkedIn came from years of consistent posting, long enough that Jen built a real founder brand there.

The thing Jen didn’t mention is the narrative underneath the launch. They led with an argument that’s easy to get behind: it’s easier than ever to build a product and harder than ever to get noticed in an attention-scarce, oversaturated market. The answer, according to Passionfroot, is renting distribution through creators your audience already trusts.

Passionfroot tested and pivoted its positioning several times over the years before landing where it is now, as the AI-native platform for B2B creator-led growth. Without a clear story about why Passionfroot exists, I reckon the funding announcement would have done a lot less.

The launch was a success in large part because it was a withdrawal from an investment account Jen and her team have been making deposits into for years.

Two weeks is how long it took to pull together the announcement launch after Passionfroot closed their round. The momentum and the business impact came from the years of work that preceded it.

That’s how marketing compounds: the earlier you start making consistent deposits, the bigger the withdrawal you can make when launch day finally arrives.

Jen's launch tactics are solid and worth implementing as you plan your next campaign. But what we see is the launch and the results it drove. What we don't see is the long-term strategy that made those results possible, and that's the focus of my next article.

If you’re just starting to lay the groundwork, investing resources into a splashy launch might not make sense. Set clear goals and expectations that match your current reality. And the time between launches may be the most valuable for your marketing, because that’s when you’re laying down the foundations that compound. The good news is that the best time to start is now.