We just launched Monaco. Here’s the exact playbook we used. I hope it's helpful to other founders and startups: 1. The launch video: most launch videos I see orient around some stressed out person at their desk or some philosophical approach to company building. Do not do this.

It suggests you’re not proud of your product and the results you deliver for customers. Most of your launch video should be your product and what you’re doing that's different and better than anything else that exists. The goal of this video should be to make people want to see more and drive them to your website to sign up or schedule a demo.

2. Distribution: The greatest launch video in the world is a complete failure if no one watches it. Distribution is equally as important as the video itself. There are a few things I recommend doing that most startups don’t do.

Start by creating a Google Sheet with 3 tabs - employees, investors, and customers. On the employees tab, have every employee at the company listed, AND columns for each person to add the most influential people they know who they can ask to amplify the launch.

The customers tab is critical. Every company has employees and investors promoting their launch. Very few have raving fan customers describing their experience. A potential customer seeing an investor post about one of their portfolio companies hits different from an actual customer posting about their experience.

I can’t tell you the number of customers we’ve signed up as a result of existing customers publicly describing their experience. On launch day, track each person listed in your Gsheet until everyone is crossed off as having posted.

3. The website: The quality and distribution of your launch video should drive demand to your website. Most startup websites look the same. You should do something different that stands out.

We did something radically different from any other startup website I’ve seen: we put quotes from the most reputable VC (Peter Thiel), accelerator CEO (Garry Tan), and startup founder (Ryan Petersen), all Monaco investors, at the top of the home page.

The result is when startup founders visit the site after watching the video, Peter, Garry, and Ryan are effectively telling them they need to get their startup on Monaco ASAP. This adds credibility and social proof for an already intrigued potential customer. Which founder is going to disagree with Peter, Garry, and Ryan?

4. Launch day campaigns: You should treat your launch as a one-time opportunity to create brand awareness about your company. You only launch once. Make the most of it.

We did a couple creative things that stood out and added to the buzz on launch day. We identified a bunch of startup founders in SF that we’d love to onboard as customers. We ordered high end Monaco branded poker sets - founders and startup employees like poker - to deliver on launch day.

We included a handwritten note with an incentive for the founder to post about their new poker set on X. Countless founders of some of the best startups were posting on launch day with images of their new poker set and tagging Monaco.

We didn’t stop there. The weekend before our launch I was out for a walk in SF and saw a bunch of LED box trucks advertising for the Super Bowl. I thought it’d be cool to have these same trucks driving around SF all day on our launch day.

I reached out to some of the vendors and was able to book 6 of these trucks at a heavily discounted rate because they were already in SF for the Super Bowl.

Again, countless posts from people seeing these trucks, who had seen our launch video, and had maybe even received a poker set, with the sentiment that Monaco is EVERYWHERE today.

5. Reinforcement - this is equally as important as the launch itself. The mistake most startups make is after they launch, they go silent and largely disappear. There are countless “remember that company that did that thing everyone was talking about? I wonder what happened to them.”

Post launch, you want to remain the company everyone is talking about. Over the coming days, weeks, and months our hope is you will continue to see Monaco everywhere through our campaigns and customers highlighting their wins on Monaco.

You’ll see examples of this starting this week. Our goal is to suck all the oxygen out of the space. Every demo someone takes with a competitor, the question will come up: how do you compare to Monaco? That’s not how you want to start a call.

The ultimate outcome of this approach: It will be very difficult to compete against Monaco. We are going to win the space.