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Sanity's amazing launch, Stych's playground, and RevenueCat's Series C
- Authors
- Name
- Hashim Warren
- @hashim_warren
Launch of the Week
Sanity, the headless CMS just delivered a masterclass in product launches. There are several things they executed that I'm professionally jealous of.
First, they launched new features one day after announcing their Series C funding. Brilliant timing. This captured all the press attention from their funding announcement and redirected it toward showcasing their features. I like that they resisted the urge to have a "launch week," and instead concentrated on a single launch day for maximum impact.
Next, Sanity released a polished "film" and product demo. The goal doesn’t seem to be just feature adoption. Sanity is using this launch to reposition the company as something different than just a headless CMS. That’s smart. Every launch should move, strengthen, or change product positioning. When you make that bigger argument it gives the entire launch energy.
Last off, they secured a CEO interview with the press to talk about the new positioning. Chef’s kiss.
The campaign generated 38k YouTube views. That’s so much bigger than the sub-1k views most of Sanity’s videos receive. It makes me wonder if these are paid views or if it’s all natty. Given their comprehensive launch strategy, I wouldn't be surprised if the video took off through natural momentum.
Sanity pulled off the best launch I've seen all year from any developer tool company.
Enterprise Watch 🏆
Stytch, the user auth service, added a live component playground to their docs. The playground enables users to preview login forms with different features added, and customize the look and feel of the auth experience. Code playgrounds are fantastic for sales conversations, especially when a prospect is comparing vendors. Props to Stych for reducing sales friction, and winning the Enterprise Watch trophy this week.
GTM trends
Algolia, the search service published an SEO landing page for the term “AI enterprise search”. This hit my radar as an example of the SEO battle that every developer tool will face this year.
Most SaaS companies are force-feeding unwanted AI features, solving problems that no user asked for. But developer tools face genuine user demand for AI-powered versions of everything. So, in the past users looked for a vendor for enterprise search, but now developers also want to know who will provide AI enterprise search.
I published a video on LinkedIn that takes a closer look at Algolia’s tactics and what other devtools can learn from it.
Funding and Acquisitions
RevenueCat, the payment platform for gaming apps, raised $50 million in a series C. They raised money “to transition from ‘simple API for managing in-app subscriptions’ to...things like virtual currency, consumable purchases, and even ads.”
Surely the court ruling that forced Apple to allow alternative payment options in the app store drove this funding. However, RevenueCat says their experiments show that enabling web payments has a lower conversion rate. Sidenote - I love that they used their own experiments tool to do original research. It’s a smart way to market their product.
More Developer Tool News
✨ Frontegg, the auth platform, launched identity management for AI Agents. In contrast to Auth0 which enables you to build an auth experience where Agents can login to a product on behalf of users, Frontegg’s tool is for logging in to an Agentic product itself.
✨ Mux, the video platform, launched a new integration with WordPress. Ashok Lalwani, Mux’s Director of partnerships introduced the feature, which makes sense because it was developed by an agency partner, 2Coders.
✨ Vercel, the front-end app platform, launched their own AI model for front-end coding. The announcement was a little weird - there’s no blog post and only a tweet and docs. And the developer community has been buzzing, wondering how Vercel built their own model.
✨ Both Neon and Metronome had service outages and wrote post mortems. For sure Engineering should write post mortems. But let’s discuss what role Marketing has in this customer communication.
First, marketing must be ready with a plan. Every service has outages, and no marketing team should scramble to dream up a plan and get it approved while an outage is happening.
Second, the marketing team should decide where a post mortem is published. On the blog? On social media? Within the app? In an email to customers?
Lastly, marketing needs to arm sales with talking points about the outage. Sales needs to “disclose with confidence” with the understanding that a solid post-mortem will help, not hurt a sale.