How Stytch Launched out of stealth, stayed on LaunchNotes through hypergrowth, and an acquisition

Stytch gives developers an API-first way to add passwordless authentication to their applications, aiming for better security without the friction of passwords. Co-founders Reed McGinley-Stempel and Julianna Lamb started the company in 2020.

Stytch raised a $6M seed round in mid-2020, a $30M Series A in July 2021, and a $90M Series B at a $1B valuation that November. In October 2025, Twilio acquired Stytch to build what it calls an "intelligent identity layer" for agentic AI.

The problem: launching out of stealth without a way to talk to users

By July 2021, Stytch had a product, a fresh Series A, and a list of email addresses from early adopters — but no established way to reach them.

"We had no other way of communicating with users." said Spyri Karasavva, who led Growth at Stytch at the time.

Karasavva and her team knew the product would keep evolving quickly, so a one-time launch announcement wouldn't be enough. They needed a single place to continuously share updates, and a way to show early adopters that the team was listening and shipping fast. When they mapped out what that required, the list quickly outgrew anything a simple changelog or email tool could offer.

What Stytch needed

• Multiple delivery channels — web, email, and Slack — with subscriber-side control over which ones they used
• Category-level subscriptions, so readers could follow just the product areas they cared about
• Marketing-grade design that matched the rest of the Stytch site
• No engineering or design time pulled from their own team
• Fast setup — a startup can't afford a long implementation
• Support for unlimited subscribers without a growth penalty

The solution: a launch page live in two weeks

Once the team evaluated LaunchNotes, they found it was the only option that checked every box on their list. Stytch's leadership also liked the platform's flexibility and the option to grow into other LaunchNotes features, like Roadmaps and Feedback, later — and described the evaluation and onboarding process as one of the best they'd experienced.

"We were up and running within two weeks," Karasavva said.

LaunchNotes worked with Stytch to build a page matching the design and layout of the rest of their site, so the path from stytch.com to their changelog felt like one continuous experience rather than a handoff to a different tool.

The impact: a launch channel that's still running, five years later

Stytch used its new LaunchNotes page to launch out of stealth into general availability. The company's developer base grew quickly in the months that followed — from roughly 350 developers in July 2021 to about 4,000 by November — on the strength of a hot category, a well-capitalized launch, and a product developers wanted. LaunchNotes was the channel Stytch used to reach that audience throughout.

The number LaunchNotes can take direct credit for: Stytch's first product update sent through the platform landed a 91% open rate. "The platform keeps delivering, week after week," Karasavva said at the time.That reliability is a big part of why Stytch kept using LaunchNotes long after the initial launch. Chris O'Neill, who leads developer relations at Stytch, has published updates through the platform on a regular cadence ever since — through the Series B, through the company's growth into a widely-used authentication platform, and through its 2025 acquisition by Twilio.

"LaunchNotes is critical to our customer feedback loop — it lets us maintain an ongoing conversation with developers and let them know about the features we ship," O'Neill said.

As of mid-2026, Stytch is folding its changelog into a broader documentation redesign as part of joining Twilio, but LaunchNotes remains the platform behind it, five years after that first stealth launch.