LaunchNotes Reviews

It’s rare, but sometimes software comes along that just checks all the boxes. LaunchNotes is that kind of software. It’s incredibly easy to set up and use, provides value for our entire team, our customers love it, and it’s solved a huge need for us. On top of that the price is right and the team that built it is super responsive and helpful.

I can’t pick a single thing I like best, but I will say that LaunchNotes has quickly become one of the most valuable tools in our tech stack.

There’s nothing I really dislike about the product, but would love to see the product integrate into more tools. We’re powering our roadmap from Jira, but I think it’s a no-brainer for LaunchNotes to also integrate into our CRM and some of our other dev tools. That said, I’ve been in touch with the team and I know additional integrations are on the way. So not much of a concern at this point.

For startups momentum is essential. It’s vital for our early adopters, investors, prospective customers, and potential competitors. LaunchNotes provides us with the perfect tool to not only showcase momentum, but also ensure we’re always building the highest impact thing… and bringing our customers along for the ride as we do. From selectively sharing our product roadmap to teasing new features and ideas to quickly collecting contextual feedback on what we’re building and launching, we can do it all in LaunchNotes. They’ve really nailed it.

Beyond just serving as a one-stop shop for all of our release comms, release notes, etc., the most useful thing about LaunchNotes is that it makes teasing new features super easy. Instead of waiting until launch day to do a “big reveal,” I can give users a sneak peek of what we’re working on, what’s coming down the pike, and what they have to look forward to. It’s a great way to keep users engaged, but also to get them fired up about what the team is working on so they’re always excited about new features and functionality.

I’ve also been using it to find and enroll users into beta programs, which is honestly not something I was able to successfully do before LaunchNotes. I have a “beta” category, and anyone that’s subscribed to that gets notifications on beta features we’re rolling out. So my users interested in being on the cutting edge always get first access, and I can enroll them without bugging anyone else. It’s brilliant.

A minor thing that I’ve asked the LaunchNotes team for the ability to do is to help me better coordinate with my PM in the run-up before a launch. There’s a ton of prep work that needs to happen before a big release, and they have a huge opportunity to help teams coordinate this planning and pre-work.

I did reach out and suggested this as a potential feature and the LaunchNotes team said they would think about it and do some customer research. So I hope I’m not the only one that wants this. In either case, it’s refreshing how responsive and helpful they were when I reached out.

The biggest problem we had that LaunchNotes solved was keeping our users in the loop of what we were working on. Prior to LaunchNotes I wrote a monthly email that went out to everyone, but the email took a ton of time to write and I found users engaging with it less and less. Now we can send short, “heartbeat” updates as we work on new features and updates, and I know the right users are being notified about the things they care about in near real-time. It’s easier and faster for our team, and engagement rates are through the roof compared to the email I used to send.

In short, LaunchNotes saves us a ton of time, and keeps our users happier and more engaged. Win/win.

LaunchNotes is built on a super powerful, customizable segmentation platform that allows our users to subscribe to the categories of updates they want to receive. As a startup, and one that’s moving super quickly and rolling out a lot of changes all the time, this is a game-changing capability for us. Our PMM team can get the word out about every improvement, but do so without having to tee up a unique email each time, or without the risk of driving unsubscribes from our master email list.

With LaunchNotes, our beta customers get updates on beta features, admins receive notifications about upcoming changes to their admin portal, we can tease new features to end users that we know they’ll love, and so on. It’s perfect.

LaunchNotes has a great Slack integration that allows our users to choose to receive their LaunchNotes updates via Slack instead of email. I’d love to see LaunchNotes continue to offer users other integration options as well, such as Microsoft Teams or even RSS. A lot of our users are on Slack, but not everyone.

The biggest problem I was trying to solve was helping my PMM team (which is essentially one full-time person right now) scale itself. A few months ago, the sheer number of new things we had coming down the pike far outweighed our PMM’s ability to properly promote each and every update. LaunchNotes has changed the game in this regard, as it makes it dead simple for our small (yet mighty!) PMM team to get the word out to users in a consistent, segmented, and impactful way.

I would say the two largest benefits I’ve seen from LaunchNotes have been 1) an increase in the amount of direct, meaningful communication we’re having with our customers every week and, in turn, 2) far higher engagement with our product, and specifically new features.

There are a ton of things to love about the LaunchNotes product. It’s a changelog, product roadmap, and customer feedback collection system in one. And the team behind it has put a ton of emphasis on the UX, which really shines through.

However, I’d say the thing I like the most about LaunchNotes is the team and customer service. The team is insanely approachable and responsive, the customer service is incredible, and the speed at which they ship new features and bug fixes and such is quite impressive. Love supporting teams like this.

Occasionally I run into small bugs and such, but it’s never that big of a deal. Especially since their support is so responsible. Honestly, I can’t say there’s anything I really dislike about the platform or service.

Our original need was for a customizable changelog that we could quickly set up to showcase everything we were shipping. Once we got that in place we realized that LaunchNotes also comes with product roadmaps, and our usage expanded to include a product roadmap as well. Our PM and PMM teams really love being able to share what’s on the roadmap. And then we’ve recently begun collecting feedback through LaunchNotes as well, which has been a lifesaver for our customer-facing teams. In short, it’s solved a lot of problems for us in a very short period of time!

The feature our team uses the most is the LaunchNotes widget, and it’s been a game-changer for communicating updates with our users and getting them engaged with the product. In a space like ours, product momentum is vital and LaunchNotes has allowed us to easily showcase everything we’re shipping. Now that the widget has become a normal part of our launch process I can’t imagine life without it.

While it’s great to announce things through the widget, I’d love the ability to also collect feedback through the widget as well. LaunchNotes has a lot of great feedback functionality and it would be terrific to have that functionality extended into the widget experience. However, I’ve been in touch with the LaunchNotes team and they assure me they’re considering adding this. Otherwise I can’t say there’s anything we really dislike.

The LaunchNotes team shows a lot of passion when it comes to soliciting product design feedback -- if there's functionality you're after that they don't currently offer, definitely share your feedback and use case with their product team.

Our team improves the product on a very regular cadence and having the ability to efficiently communicate these updates to our customers is the biggest problem we’re solving with LaunchNotes. Since beginning to use LaunchNotes we’ve definitely seen stronger product engagement and happier customers. Our engineering team has also really enjoyed seeing their work promoted so quickly and regularly.

The holistic view that LaunchNotes has when it comes to product development is super refreshing. From my experience it’s the only tool (and team) that deeply understands how product development should be done. And they’ve built the perfect tool to supercharge this process and help product teams better serve their customers. To say I’m a huge fan would be an understatement.

There’s nothing I dislike, but there are a few things I’m incredibly excited to see the LaunchNotes team build. For example I know their ideas functionality is relatively new, but I can’t wait until I can tie ideas to my CRM and see things like deal size. Once LaunchNotes unlocks this ability it’s going to truly revolutionize the way we plan and build.

Prior to LaunchNotes our planning, building, and feature release processes seemed super disjointed. After adopting the platform and bringing all of those things under one roof, it’s made our entire product development lifecycle significantly faster and more efficient. And now that we’ve got our system really dialed in LaunchNotes I can’t remember or imagine how we survived without it!

The brand customization options that LaunchNotes provides are fantastic. From the hosted page to the emails to the in-app widget, it’s designed so that every channel can be fully customized to match our brand. Whenever we introduce new customer-facing tools the #1 concern from our Design and UX teams is that it won’t be a consistent experience for our users. In the case of LaunchNotes, Design and UX are two of the product’s biggest advocates in the building!

I would also say that the customer support we’ve received from the LaunchNotes team, especially as we got the product up and running, has been stellar.

I would love to see LaunchNotes roll out some sort of feedback mechanism so that we could begin to create a feedback loop with customers directly from each release/announcement. It seems like a natural extension of what the product already excels at, and if they built something like this into the tool I would dump the product we’re currently using for product feedback in a heartbeat.

As our startup continues to quickly scale, one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced is finding efficient ways to both track and announce everything we’re shipping to our customers. We created a simple Notion page with a changelog initialize, only to realize that having a changelog living next to a section of our blog focused on product announcements was confusing for users. They kept asking us where they should go to stay on top of what we were launching and we didn’t have a single place to send them.

With LaunchNotes, we’ve been able to consolidate our changelog and the what’s new section of our blog into a single channel. The benefits of this are twofold: 1) for us, it’s less tools to manage and a single product we can use for both release notes and product launches, and 2) for our users it’s a single place they can monitor (and subscribe to) to ensure they’re always on top of what’s changing in our app and what new features and functionality we’re launching. It’s the epitome of two birds and one stone.

I know LaunchNotes got its start as a changelog tool, but my favorite feature is by far the product roadmap. In fact, since we rolled out LaunchNotes it’s the only roadmap tool I’ll allow my team to use. Four huge benefits to using LaunchNotes to communicate our roadmap:

1. It’s completely customizable and maps perfectly to our product development lifecycle

2. Users can subscribe to work items so they’re automatically notified when we ship the things they care about

3. When we’re ready to roll out new features we can turn roadmap items into announcements with a few clicks

4. Users (and prospective users) can leave feedback on work items, and LaunchNotes collects consent so our PMs can immediately follow up for more info

There are a few small UI tweaks that I’d love to see made, but that’s about it. And I know most of these improvements are already on their radar and being worked on.

The thing I’m looking forward to seeing them ship the most is a tighter Jira integration. Our current roadmap is powered by Jira automation, but there are a few additional options for further customization that I’ve asked them to add to their roadmap. But none of these things are mission critical.

The original problem we were solving when we adopted the product was keeping our customers updated and engaged, and the product worked perfectly for that. However, ever since we began using the product roadmap and customer feedback functionality, I would say the product has become our main customer communication platform, and it’s how our user base stays up-to-date on everything our R&D team is working on.

The most recent benefit we’ve realized is actually one that we weren’t expecting. Our ability to share our product roadmap, and specifically to have that roadmap living in parallel with all of our announcements, has become a major competitive advantage for our GTM teams. We’re in a competitive space and showcasing product momentum on our LaunchNotes roadmap is winning deals. After all, everyone wants to be where the momentum is!

We love that LaunchNotes allows us to have a two-way dialog with our customers and prospects. It's a critical channel for us to gather insights from our most trusted critics while changes are made. It's real-time. It's fresh. And it's applicable for what we're building now, not just what we're building in the future.

It would be great if users could give us ideas and then upvote said ideas all within LaunchNotes. We feel that it's the missing link and are excited to see how they are thinking about this problem and if it's on the horizon.

At Journey, we firmly believe that shipping in public is the best, most transparent path forward - it's a key to success and frankly table stakes for a small, fast-growing startup like ours. To do so, a public changelog is essential to put our momentum on display and show the world what we're building and how it impacts them.

We’ve been LaunchNotes users for quite some time now, and my team and I have always really liked the product. It’s intuitive, elegantly serves its purpose, and the team behind it is great. However, I always felt like there was one missing piece to the puzzle, and when they recently rolled out product feedback I realized this was the missing piece.

Now that the product allows us to not only communicate our roadmap and send out hyper-targeted announcements, but also collect feedback throughout this entire process, it’s value to our team has skyrocketed. With the product feedback functionality our entire software team feels like we have a brand new channel to maintain an ongoing dialogue with our customers. Even in the few short months it’s been live the Customer Feedback Manager has helped us build and ship higher quality features, as well as drive increased engagement to those features once they were live.

The only fault I can find with LaunchNotes is that I wish there were more best practices built into the product. It’s such an incredible product offering and I feel like if they could layer on best practices for teams like ours to fully maximize its value, we would be able to get so much more out of the product. Right now we love it and it’s working well, but I know there are things we could be doing with the product that we aren’t. Some built-in best practices to guide us through this would be a huge win.

We originally adopted LaunchNotes to consolidate all of our change comms into a single channel that could live alongside our product roadmap. Prior to LaunchNotes these things all lived in various places and it was a mess keeping everything up-to-date. More recently, with the advent of customer feedback, I would say we now see LaunchNotes as our one-stop-shop for consolidating all product change communication (of which feedback is a huge piece) into one, single place.

Overall we’ve seen two huge benefits from LaunchNotes: 1) at least double the engagement rates we were seeing prior to its adoption and 2) the ability to effortlessly weave customer feedback into our product development lifecycle for the first time. The ability to tie customer feedback directly to our roadmap and product announcements has been particularly game-changing.