How to build & maintain momentum

Building a successful company – particularly a product company is about momentum.

Achieving momentum as a small team is very difficult, and maintaining it is even harder.

On top of that, you not only have to ship, you have to share as you ship. You have to publish content in a way that creates the sense that your team ships.

There’s no better solution than actually shipping a lot, but in addition to that:

1) Changelog Entries (min. 1-2 per month)

As you ship, post regular changelog entries. Take the time to craft your changelog, don’t just dump a list of what’s new, improved, and fixed into a list.

Make it worth your user’s attention.

That way, it achieves its goal beyond just letting people know you’re still around – people share it along, you can post it on social media, etc.

Example: https://vercel.com/changelog

Achieving a changelog like Vercel’s isn’t easy, and it’s a clear credit to their team. We advise most companies to aim for at least 1-2 changelog entries per month.

Obviously, if you’re trying to compete against Vercel, you’ll be up against a team that has shipped a changelog (and associated product changes) on April 10th, 9th, 8th, 5th, and …

You get the idea.

2) Bigger Feature Launches (min. 4 per year)

Think of a “bigger feature launch” as any feature launch worth spending more time preparing to announce. This largely should depend on the importance of the release (to both current and future users). Assets include blog posts, social posts, changelog entries, video content, etc.

Example: More than one example to share here:

• https://runcloud.io/blog/introducing-mysql-support
  
  Instead of a regular changelog, since this was a more widely “celebrated” release among RunCloud’s customer base, we played into that by celebrating it as well.
  
  

• https://runcloud.io/docs/how-to-create-a-workspace
  
  Another RunCloud example: Here, we coordinated the release of their updated documentation (not the only help document related to this feature) to introduce the new concept of “workspaces”.
  
  

• 
  
  And last but not least, we also produced a video to accompany the release of RunCloud’s Workspace feature (which is very relevant because it is a more complex feature with customer user permissions, etc.).

Assets like this should be planned ahead of a release and released in conjunction with the actual release of a new feature in your product.

3) Blog Posts (1-8 per month)

Your blog should be used to share content across three main formats:

1. Company News and Product Updates

2. Industry Guides and Tutorials

3. Company Culture, Philosophy, etc.

Format #2 is what you need to become an authority on a specific topic, and it will allow you to achieve a content velocity of ~ 8 per month.

However, also publishing company news, product updates (as covered in #2), and content about your company culture, philosophy of what you’re building, etc., goes hand in hand with general guides and tutorial content.

Example: https://runcloud.io/blog/

4) Customer Stories (1-2 per month)

Telling your customers' stories is crucial to attracting new customers by directly showing how people are using your product. Beyond that, it also serves as a shareable asset that your best customers will share and can help keep your team motivated and excited to build the product they’re working on.

Example: https://planetscale.com/case-studies/dub

Including a video, as PlanetScale did in the case of the above customer story and as we do for the case studies we produce for companies we operate and advise, obviously helps these go even further.

5) Social Posts (1 per day)

Try to be very active in a handful of places that your team can manage. My personal recommendations are Twitter/X and LinkedIn.

Example: https://x.com/plainsupport

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📰 News, Updates, and Resources Worth Your Time

Figma trademark warfare, TechCrunch
Figma sent a cease-and-desist letter to Lovable over the term ‘Dev Mode’. The community is tearing them apart for it – rightfully so. It seems widely accepted that trademark is a generic phrase (used widely before Figma) and should, therefore, not have been granted.

But then again, “managed WordPress” has also recently been trademarked by Automattic, so there seems to be a clear debate surrounding whether patent/trademark legislation & whether those responsible are following what is going on in the industry enough to make decisions about trademarks.

US funding running out for critical cyber vulnerability database, Reuters

The CVE program has lost funding, and MITRE said that the CVE website listing vulnerabilities will remain up after the funding expires, but new CVEs won’t be added after April 16. This means that the new security vulnerabilities disclosed by vulnerability disclosure programs are unlikely to show up in the CVE database until funding for the CVE program is restored.

If you previously relied on CVE data to scan for vulnerabilities (as a hosting provider or managed service provider), we strongly recommend contacting Patchstack to plan ahead and find a way to access data directly from the source.

Use Scenario Planning To Prepare For The Impact Of Tariffs On IT Costs, Forrester
The new US tariffs — 10% generally, 34% on Chinese imports, and 20% on EU goods — have set the stage for increasing IT costs. To navigate these challenges, identify worst-case, best-case, and likely scenarios, along with the specific actions needed to mitigate the heightened cost pressures entailed in each.

Vision & Velocity: HubSpot Launches 200+ Features to Help SMBs, HubSpot Blog
HubSpot announces various AI-related updates (KB Agent, Prospecting Agent, Content Agent)

✍️Become A Better Writer: Drop the Fluff

This week’s writing tip reminds me of my teaching days…

Fluff words that just inflate the word count!

There are many examples of these, but this week I want to focus on this horrid pair of vacuous words: ‘that are’.

They add nothing but two words to the count – and removing them sharpens the sentence.

Example #1

• Original: Here are the key principles that are essential for effective marketing.

• Improved: Here are the key principles essential for effective marketing.

Example #2

• Original: She only buys products that are made from organic ingredients.

• Improved: She only buys products made from organic ingredients.

Example #3

• Original: We focus on strategies that are proven to increase engagement.

• Improved: We focus on strategies proven to increase engagement.

Next time you’re editing an article, do a quick ‘search and replace’, and remove that pair of words entirely!

😅Something fun

Because we all need it right now.

Thank you for reading & see you next week.

Meanwhile, keep doing the work that matters™.

Yours,

– Alex, Justin, and Naman at ScaleMath 💌