How to Run a Launch Week in 2026: Plan, Daily Posts, Recap

A launch week is five days in a row where a company announces one new thing each day, then closes with a summary post that collects everything in one place. To run one, pick four or five finished items, give each its own day and post, keep a running log as the week goes, and publish the recap within a few days of Friday.

It sounds like a marketing trick, and partly it is. But a good launch week also forces a team to finish things, tell a clear story about where the product is going, and give people a reason to come back every morning. This guide covers what a launch week is, with real examples from the companies that made the format popular, how to plan the days, how to write the daily announcement, how to keep notes during the week and how to write the summary post, with an outline you can copy.

What is a launch week?

A launch week is a planned run of daily product announcements, usually Monday to Friday, released under one name and wrapped up with a recap. Instead of one big launch day, attention builds across the week, and each announcement gets its own moment rather than competing with ten others in a single post.

Three companies show the range of the format, each on its own pages:

• Raycast, the Mac launcher, ran a launch week from Monday, July 18 to Friday, July 22, 2022, releasing something new each day: community stories, a redesign, Raycast for Teams out of beta, menu bar commands, and community swag. Its launch week summary gave each day its own section. (Raycast for Teams is still around; here's what it does today, and there's a fair look at Raycast and its alternatives.)
• Supabase, the open source Postgres platform, replaced a planned launch day with a launch week in 2021 after someone asked why they should have just one launch, as it explains in how Supabase launches. It now runs them on a roughly three-month cycle. Launch Week 15 ran July 14 to 18, 2025, with a main launch each day, extra smaller releases, a 10-day hackathon starting Friday and community meetups in dozens of cities.
• Cloudflare runs themed "Innovation Weeks" such as Developer Week, Security Week and Birthday Week. It held seven of them in 2021, "rather than having one large conference annually," according to its 2021 Innovation Weeks review.

The common thread is simple: one name, a fixed window, something new every day, and one page at the end that lists everything.

Is a launch week right for your team?

A launch week makes sense when you have at least four things that are genuinely ready, or nearly ready, and each one is interesting on its own. If you only have one big feature, give it a proper launch day instead. Spreading one feature across five days makes Tuesday through Friday feel thin, and people notice.

It also helps to know what not to do. Supabase says it "very rarely" holds features back for launch week: it ships early, mentions the work in its monthly update, and uses the week for the full write-ups and wider marketing. That's the right instinct. Sitting on finished work for two months so it can headline a Wednesday hurts customers who could have used it.

A quick way to decide:

How to plan the five days of a launch week

Planning a launch week starts four to six weeks out with a list of candidates, a lead for each, and a fixed date. Supabase's own process runs on a three-month cycle, with roughly a dozen candidate items, one lead per item, press organized up to three weeks before, and major third-party integrations finished a week before launch.

1. Fix the dates. Pick a Monday-to-Friday week that avoids public holidays and big industry events where your news would be buried.
2. List every candidate. Write down everything that could plausibly be ready, with a one-line description and an owner. You want more candidates than days, because some will slip.
3. Cut to four or five. Keep the items a customer would describe to a colleague. Fold small fixes into a single "everything else" post or into the recap.
4. Assign days. Put something strong on Monday to set the tone and something strong midweek to keep people coming back. Friday works well for community, a hackathon or a lighter item.
5. Book the outside dependencies early. Partners, integrations and press need lead time. Supabase notes that coordinating with other companies can block you, so start those first.
6. Write every post before the week starts. Drafts, screenshots, videos and social copy should be ready by the Friday before. The week itself is for publishing and answering people, not writing.
7. Decide the rule for slips. If an item isn't ready, swap in another or drop the day. Supabase's rule is to announce something else and move the late item to the next one.

When a midweek feature slipped on me once, I moved Friday's item up and pushed the late one to the next cycle rather than shipping it half-done. Nobody outside the team knew the original order, which is a good reason not to publish the full schedule in advance.

A sample launch week schedule

How to write the daily launch week announcement

Each daily announcement should stand alone: a reader who sees only Wednesday's post should understand what's new, why it matters and how to try it, without having read Monday's. Many people will only ever see one day.

I write the first line of every daily post before anything else: what someone can do today that they couldn't do yesterday. If that line is hard to write, the feature probably isn't ready for its own day.

A daily post that works usually has:

• A headline that names the feature, not the day. "Shared snippets for teams" beats "Day 3 of launch week."
• One short paragraph on the problem it solves, in the customer's words.
• A screenshot or 30-second video showing it working.
• How to get it: which plan, which version, whether it's in beta, and a link to the docs.
• A line pointing to the hub page where the whole week lives, so people can catch up.

Publish at the same time every day so people know when to look. If you're also posting on Product Hunt, its launch guide suggests 12:01 a.m. Pacific Time because the homepage runs on a 24-hour cycle, and you can schedule a post up to a month ahead. Check the same guide's rules on resubmitting a product within two months before you pick a day for it.

For the internal side, write the team's daily heads-up the evening before and schedule it. In Slack, write it as usual, then use the small arrow beside the paper plane icon to pick a later time, as Slack's help page shows. There's a step-by-step guide to scheduling Slack messages if you haven't used it.

How to keep notes during launch week

Keep one running log for the whole week, started on Monday morning, and add to it the moment something happens: the live link, the post, a sharp customer reply, a bug, a number from your dashboard. The recap is far easier to write from a log than from memory on Friday afternoon.

During one launch week I kept a single note pinned above everything else in Apple Notes on my Mac and dropped everything into it as the days went: links, screenshots, the questions people kept asking. By Friday the recap was mostly a job of trimming. To pin a note on a Mac, select it and choose File > Pin Note, per Apple's Notes guide, and it stays first in the list however many notes you add.

What to capture each day:

• The links: blog post, docs, social posts, any press or community write-ups.
• Questions people asked, word for word. They become the FAQ in your recap and the next round of docs.
• Customer reactions you could quote, with a note to ask permission before you use a name.
• What broke or confused people, and what you did about it.
• Decisions from the daily stand-up: what moved, what was cut, who's following up.

A short daily stand-up during the week is worth it, and it's the meeting most worth recording. Five days of quick decisions blur together fast, and a transcript lets you check later what was actually agreed. If your team doesn't record meetings yet, start with these meeting note takers.

How to write the launch week summary post

The launch week summary post (also called the recap) lists everything announced during the week in one place, with a short description and a link for each item. It's the page you'll share for months afterward, so write it for someone who missed the whole week.

There are two common shapes, and both work:

• By day. Raycast's launch week summary has a section for each day, Monday to Friday, with the features underneath. This suits a week that told a story in order.
• By topic. Supabase's November 2021 recap has one section per announcement, each with a short description, a link to the full post and an image, then community highlights and a closing list of ways to get started. This suits a week where readers care about specific features more than the order.

For most teams I'd go by topic. Six months later, nobody remembers that the export feature came out on a Tuesday; they want to find the export feature.

Publish the recap within a few days of the week ending, while people still remember it. Raycast's summary went up about two and a half weeks after its launch week, which is fine for an archive, but a recap that lands the following Monday catches more of the people who missed a day.

A launch week summary outline you can copy

Title: [Product] Launch Week: everything we shipped
(Or: Launch Week [number] recap)

Opening (2 or 3 sentences)
- What the week was and when it ran: [Month day] to [Month day], [year].
- The one-line theme: what all of this adds up to for customers.

The headline feature
- What it does, in one paragraph.
- Who it's for and which plan it's on.
- Screenshot or video.
- Link: Read the full post / Try it now.

Feature two
- What it does, who it's for, plan or availability.
- Link to the full post and docs.

Feature three
- Same pattern.

Feature four
- Same pattern.

Everything else we shipped
- [Smaller improvement], [link]
- [Smaller improvement], [link]
- [Fix people asked for], [link]

From the community
- Customer stories, posts and videos people made (with permission).
- Hackathon or meetup details, if you ran one.

Questions people asked this week
- [Question], [short answer]
- [Question], [short answer]

What's next
- One honest sentence on what you're working on.

Get started
- Try [product]: [link]
- Read the docs: [link]
- Follow along for the next launch week: [link]

Keep the opening short. Readers who land on the recap want the list, not a speech about the week.

Common launch week mistakes, and the fix for each

Most launch week problems come from scheduling too much and leaving no slack. These are the ones that show up most often:

What to do after launch week ends

After the recap is out, hold a short retrospective while the week is fresh: what landed, what didn't, what slipped and why. Supabase rereads the findings of its last retrospective when the next planning meeting opens, which is a simple habit that stops the same mistakes repeating.

1. Publish the recap and pin it wherever people will look: your blog, changelog, community and newsletter.
2. Answer the open questions from your running log, in the docs or the help center.
3. Run the retrospective within a week, and save the notes where next cycle's planning will find them.
4. Move the slipped items onto the next launch week's candidate list.
5. Thank the people outside the team who helped: customers who shared stories, partners, community members.