The Hype Team

At Raycast, we have a team dedicated to increasing our brand awareness. Or, in other words, creating hype. The good type of hype. The type of hype that makes people curious about what Raycast is. And it makes them want to download it, try it, and stick with it. We call this team… the Hype Team.

The team

The Hype Team is made up of five people: Bruno, Inga, Tom, Samuel, and me, Pedro. We each have a different set of skills, and focus on different disciplines. But it’s this mix that makes it interesting.

• Bruno is responsible for everything video related. Planning, scripting, editing, releasing, and telling me to act more natural. You'll find them on our YouTube channel.
• Inga makes sure everything we do looks beautiful. She’s an incredible designer, with a unique ability understanding of shadows, light, reflections.
• Tom focuses on extensions. He has worked on most of our top extensions, ensuring they’re stable, maintained and making use of new APIs when needed.
• Samuel has the perfect balance between design and engineering. His focus is to build beautiful web-based experiences that may or may not be directly related to Raycast. Like our code sharing tool, snippet explorer, or icon generator.
• And I’m working on marketing, partnerships, video recordings, user research, and generally making sure we know what to do next.

As you can see, the Hype Team is a mix of marketing, content creation, community, engineering and design efforts.

Having all of those disciplines in the same team is great, because we're all working towards the same goal.

Earlier in the year, we all got together in London for our first ever Hype Week. That was the official kick off of the new team. We got to know each other on a more personal level. I think that’s important to create a strong team.

We spent some time defining our goals, philosophy and brainstorming ideas.

Our goal

It all drips down to one simple objective: motivate more people to try Raycast.

Increasing brand awareness is a broad task. It can be done through various ways, in many different styles, and different mediums. So we've decided to stick with YouTube and Twitter (however we cross-post some tweets to LinkedIn as well using Typefully).

On YouTube, we share more educational videos, where users can discover new Raycast features and learn tips that will help them stay in the flow.

On Twitter, we share updates about new releases, upcoming features, sneak peeks, and lots of tips! Official updates are done via the official @raycastapp account. But we also make use of our own personal accounts, which I personally find very effective.

The philosophy

We make sure we’re not just hyping for the sake of hyping. We're intentional about what we share, what we promise, and when we deliver on that promise.

We want people to feel the need to try Raycast, because it’ll genuinely improve how they work. And if we can make them feel that way, the next natural step is to click the download button. Which is, in fact, our main metric of success.

The content we produce usually falls in one of these categories:

• Educational: anything that will teach you something. Whether its a deep dive of a feature, or a collection of tips.
• Interviews: a good example of this is our What’s in My Raycast series, where users share how they use Raycast.
• Sneak peeks: a little glimpse of what is coming in the near-future. This helps users know what to expect and creates a sense of transparency.
• Community: our merch store, our Community Slack, and soon, a hackathon!
• Extension: anything to do with Raycast extensions, like this top extension for designers video, or this thread on how the Apple Notes extension works.

Generating spikes

One way we create effective brand awareness is by consciously generating spikes. A spike is a higher-than-usual growth in our download metrics.

Here’s how we do it:

1. Work alongside our product roadmap
2. Identify highly demanded features and requests
3. Build content around it. Videos, tweets, blog post, newsletter, maybe a side project.
4. Publish the content when the feature is released. The alignment here is important to keep the hype going. Big releases will usually go out at the beginning of the month, because that’s when our monthly newsletter goes out.

For example, when we launched Raycast Pro, we produced many different videos about it, we built a dedicated landing page for it, we mentioned it in the newsletter, we created a prompt explorer, and we partnered with creators.

By aligning all of these efforts, we’re able to amplify the message beyond a tweet and a changelog page.

Some features aren’t big enough to create a spike. But we can still turn them into mini-spikes. An example of that is when we updated the AI Chat window design. On its own, it’s a relatively small release. But by creating a story around it, we were able to reach a much wider audience, resulting in an increased number of downloads.

What's next

As we progress further in the year, we'll continue to explore new ways to talk about Raycast in a candid and honest way. We'll also analyse which type of content works best, and produce more of that. The same goes for partnerships.

For example, we know that our What's in my Raycast series is a success, so we plan to continue doing that in the future.

There are many other types of content we have't yet explored, but we'd like to in the next few months.

To me personally, it's also a brand new challenge. I've never had to lead a Hype Team before. So I'm sure there will be plenty of challenges ahead.