# How we launch at Supabase

[Supabase](https://yomu.fyi/company/supabase) · Ant Wilson · Nov 26, 2021

**Type:** Explainer

## Summary

Following their participation in YCombinator, Supabase sought a structured method to maintain product momentum and recreate the urgency of an accelerator internally. The team established Launch Week, a quarterly shipping sprint using a fixed-timeline and flexible-scope model where a major feature or announcement releases each day for a week. Each cycle begins with a broad distributed planning session that maps high-level goals and generates ideas, followed by execution and finely scheduled launch days covering coordinated social media, blog posts, and community engagement. Following the launch, team members transition into maintenance mode and downtime to handle support, bug fixes, and open-source contributions. Finally, a structured retrospective evaluates successes, failures, and process relevance before carrying lessons into the next planning meeting.

## Context

After graduating from YCombinator, Supabase faced a drop in external pressure and needed an internal framework to sustain rapid product development, user acquisition, and momentum across a distributed team.

## Approach / What changed

Supabase implemented Launch Week, setting a quarterly deadline with a fixed timeline and flexible scope to ship one major feature per day for a week. The cycle incorporates cross-functional visual planning, detailed minute-by-minute execution schedules across channels, post-launch downtime for maintenance, and a mandatory retrospective.

## Takeaways

- Adopting a fixed-timeline, flexible-scope launch model helped recreate accelerator momentum and supported a 47% month-on-month increase in managed databases over 18 months.
- Planning cycles start with a whole-company whiteboard session across 12 countries to ensure engineers and marketers align on business goals before selecting features.
- Launch weeks are followed by deliberate downtime and maintenance mode to manage support surges, bug fixes, and community pull requests sustainably.

**Tags:** [Developer Experience](https://yomu.fyi/topic/developer-experience), [Open Source](https://yomu.fyi/topic/open-source), [Remote Work](https://yomu.fyi/topic/remote-work)

[Read original post](https://supabase.com/blog/supabase-how-we-launch)