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Design partner advocacy for B2B SaaS launches

Your design partners already believe you. We get them ready to say so, publicly, on the day you launch.

Launch Control is a six-month engagement. We take the customers who ran your unfinished software, get each one recruited, legally cleared inside their own company, and rehearsed to publish in their own voice on launch day. So the loudest voice on the loudest day of your company's life isn't yours.

Straight answer on fit within 24 hours.

Briefs open · Q4
T-06, The problem[01]

You're worried that nothing will happen. So is everyone else on the cap table.

Nobody says it on the standup. Ask a founder eight weeks out what's keeping them up and you'll hear about pricing, or onboarding, or whether the VP Engineering candidate takes the offer. That's the daytime answer. The 3 a.m. answer is the same every time: we announce, and nothing happens.

Silence

You are the only person scheduled to speak

The post goes up. Your seed investor reposts. Six people you went to college with comment "congrats, huge." By Thursday, two years of work has been absorbed by a market that won't remember your name in a month.

Credibility

A founder describing their own product is a claim

The market has learned to discount you. Everyone expects the founder to say the product is good, that's the job. The failure mode is almost never that the market disagreed. It's that nobody else was talking.

Timing

Launch day is a window, not a channel

It opens once. It doesn't reopen on a better week because you weren't ready. Your Q1 pipeline, your next senior hire, and the fund that wasn't going to look at your round all get priced off that window.

Buyers don't take the founder's word for it. They check. If you're the only one talking on launch day, there's nothing for them to check. And you spend the next four quarters buying the attention you had one free shot at earning.

One voice, however well written, is a claim. It isn't evidence.

T-05, The asset[02]

The people who can fix this are already in your Slack

Your design partners ran unfinished software inside a real company. They filed the bugs. They defended the decision internally the week it broke. Somewhere around month four, one of them said the thing that changed your roadmap.

They have lived with the problem you solve for longer than you've been solving it, and they describe it in the exact language your buyers use, because they are your buyers.

On most launch days, none of them say a word. Not because they don't want to. Because nobody asked them, nobody gave them anything to say, and nobody started the approval process inside their company early enough for them to be allowed to say it.

The advocacy problem is a clearance problem. Clearance takes months.

T-04, How it works[03]

From design partner to public advocate, in three moves

01, Roster

Roster

We work your design partner list and find out who will actually show up. Some can't, for reasons that have nothing to do with how they feel about you. Better to know in month one than in week eleven.

→ Months 1–2
02, Clearance

Clearance

Internal approval at their company, legal, comms, sometimes the CEO. Drafting in their voice, not yours. Agreeing what each person is comfortable saying about results, and what they're not.

→ Months 3–4
03, Rehearsal

Rehearsal

Sequencing. Who posts, where, in what order, and what happens in the replies. A dozen people posting the same talking points inside an hour reads as a campaign and gets discounted accordingly.

→ Month 5
Why it takes six months[04]

Writing the post takes an afternoon. Getting permission to publish it takes months.

Six months sounds like a lot until you've tried to get a director at a 400-person company cleared by their legal and comms teams to say something public about a vendor. Writing the post takes an afternoon. Clearance runs six to ten weeks by itself, and it can't start until the design partner has agreed, which can't start until we've talked to them.

T-06T-00
Roster
Clearance
Rehearsal
Ignition

On launch day we're on with you from the first post to the last reply.

T-03, Deliverables[05]

What actually arrives

Before launch day

  • Design partner roster, scored for willingness and clearance risk, account by account
  • Named internal sponsor and approval path mapped inside each partner company
  • Clearance secured in writing, per advocate, with the exact language each one is approved to use
  • Drafted content in each advocate's own voice, post, thread, and reply guidance
  • A sequenced publication schedule across LinkedIn, X, and YouTube
  • Full setup on Kindling: profiles, verification, rates, payout rails, tax documents

On launch day and after

  • Live coverage from first post to last reply, moving people toward wherever the conversation goes
  • Every post tracked: impressions, engagement, and performance in the dashboard
  • Payouts handled, W-9s, 1099s, FTC disclosure review, disbursement on the 1st and 15th
  • The roster and the content library are yours to keep, either way
  • A live advocacy program you can ask again, not a folder of screenshots
Who does this[06]

Who you'd actually be working with

Brian De Groodt, founder of Launch Control

Brian De Groodt

Launch Control

Brian De Groodt runs Launch Control and Kindling. Twenty-five years in enterprise software GTM at SAP, Medallia, ADP, Cornerstone, and CEB/Gartner. More than $250 million in closed enterprise SaaS revenue. He built the platform this engagement runs on.

Built on a live platform

Every engagement runs on Kindling: recruitment, verification, briefing, payouts, and tracking. It's a real product with published pricing, not an internal spreadsheet.

See Kindling →

The method is the evidence

Advocacy-Led Growth is a defined practice with public documentation, a compounding-curve model, and a cost calculator.

Read the thesis →

Where we are today

We're early. A small number of launches a quarter, by design. If you want to talk to someone who has run this, we'll put you on with them, or tell you straight that you'd be the first.

Read the argument →

Kindling is the platform. Launch Control is the six-month, done-for-you engagement that uses it to get a specific set of people ready for a specific day.

T-02, Scope[07]

We do one thing

✱ We doWe don't
Design partner advocacy for launch dayPress releases
Clearance inside your customers' companiesReporter pitches
Drafting in your advocates' voicesPodcast tours
Sequencing and live launch-day coverageInfluencer campaigns
Payouts, tax, and FTC complianceICP mapping
The Kindling program that outlives launch weekMessaging workshops
Category narrative from scratch

Firms exist for all of that and some of them are very good. If you need your positioning figured out, hire one of them first, then come to us with it finished.

T-01, What comes after[08]

Getting off the pad is the easy half

Nothing reaches orbit on one burn. The first gets you off the ground, that's the one everyone budgets for and loses sleep over. The second is what keeps you up there. Plenty of companies never fire it, which is why so many launches look spectacular for nine days and then quietly reenter.

When launch day ends, you aren't handed a folder of screenshots. You have a live roster of customers who have already gone on record for you once, in a system built to ask them again.

Fly it yourself

The roster and content library are yours. Kindling continues at standard rate and your team runs the program.

Or stay under power

Months 7–12 on Kindling's managed advocacy engagement. We recruit past the original design partners, keep the rhythm against real product milestones, put paid amplification behind what performs, and track influenced pipeline deal by deal. Month twelve ends with an operations manual and a team that runs it without us.

You decide in month five. No penalty either way.

T-00, The offer[09]

Two ways in

Launch Readiness Audit

$7,500 · 3 weeks · credited in full against the full engagement

Before you commit six months, find out whether your roster can carry a launch. We score every design partner for willingness and clearance risk, map the approval path inside each account, and give you a straight go/no-go on your launch date.

Start with an audit

Launch Control

$60,000 · 6 months · Kindling platform included

Your design partners, cleared and ready to speak on the day you launch, and still on the roster the week after.

Book a launch review

Then, if you want the second burn: months 7–12 on Kindling's managed advocacy engagement, another six months at $60,000, ending with the channel in your team's hands and the operations manual to run it.

We take a small number of launches per quarter. This is people work and it doesn't compress. If your launch is inside five months, we'll tell you on the first call that we're not the right fit rather than take the money.

Comms, FAQ[10]

Questions worth asking before you email

Then we're not the right fit for this launch, and we'll tell you that on the first call rather than take the money. The binding constraint isn't our capacity, it's how long it takes a customer's legal and communications teams to approve an employee saying something public about a vendor. At a 400-person company that runs six to ten weeks by itself, and it can't start until the design partner has agreed, which can't happen until we've talked to them.

Ignition, Ready[11]

Initiate launch sequence

If you're six to nine months from coming out of stealth, that's the conversation. Tell us the shape of your launch and who your design partners are. You'll get a straight answer on fit within 24 hours, including "not yet," if that's the answer.

Not ready to talk? Read the argument instead.

The Quiet Launch, why most B2B launches go silent, and the six-month clearance problem nobody plans for. One email, no sequence, unsubscribe anytime.