Bringing products to market are moments of magic because it’s when we are able to deliver on customer needs and experience their real-time reactions after months of coordinated efforts internally. And sometimes, these moments extend far beyond a single day.

At Webflow Conf in 2024, we re-introduced Webflow as a Website Experience Platform (WXP) to the world, helping our customers grow and transform their own brands with the launches of our Analyze and Optimize products. We also announced that we acquired GSAP, and saying our customers and partners were excited is probably an understatement. Our community rightfully assumed this was the first phase of a complete makeover of our interactions platform.

We welcomed GSAP into the Webflow family because we truly believe in the power of animations and interactions to create emotional bonds with your audience. We also knew that GSAP was not just an industry-leading JavaScript animation library, but also one that has a highly-engaged and talented community of creative developers, is home to incredible educational resources, and believes in helping their community deliver pixel perfection. 

At the end of April, we announced GSAP is now 100% free for the entire web community. We wanted to remove any remaining friction from using the best animation library on the web, as well as roll out a series of improvements for GSAP developers and our shared Webflow customers, and we couldn’t be more humbled by the positive reception.

This launch was one of my favorite moments ever at Webflow, both for the incredible community response it received and because it captured something crucial about this moment in web development. As AI reshapes our industry, this initiative struck a chord with our audience’s complex feelings about how AI may transform — or threaten — their craft. The energy and enthusiasm around this rollout further confirmed our belief that creativity and bespoke animation are critical to brand differentiation and matter now more than ever.

So much went into this launch, making it one of our most successful initiatives to date. And today, I’m going to share our detailed playbook for how we assembled our go-to-market strategy — which continues to generate buzz five weeks later — and the exciting plans we have in store for the future.

We made a community-first product bet: Announcing GSAP is now 100% free

While GSAP was never super expensive, we knew any price was a point of friction. By absorbing the cost of maintaining and improving GSAP, Webflow was able to: 

1. Create marketing momentum: The announcement posts went viral among our community, as well as the new-to-Webflow community, the GSAP crowd. Across channels, these posts generated over half a million impressions, nearly 45,000 engagements, and a 27.5% engagement rate — a 1000+% increase compared to the industry average for engagement.
2. Expand our creative developer base: In the first two weeks post-launch, thousands of sites on Webflow enabled GSAP for the first time. When comparing the five weeks pre- and post-launch, we’ve observed a 27% increase in week-over-week adoption of GSAP in Webflow. The halo effect of a superb launch for our product has been awesome! 
3. Go long on developer tools: This relaunch also created a halo around Webflow’s significant investment in “pro-code” tools for developers, and it was quickly followed by our Webflow Cloud launch just days later. 
4. Build trust with new community members that we were in it for the long haul: We understand why some members of the GSAP community had their doubts about our intentions post-acquisition. We always intended to continue investing in GSAP for the long haul — and were happy to share this intention publicly for the first time. 

Pulling this together was a massive coordinated effort that took thoughtful planning. This included administering refunds for customers that had made a recent GSAP purchase because it was the right thing to do. 

The result of this initiative was a tremendous outpouring of gratitude and energy from the GSAP community. I personally couldn’t stop reading all of the positive messages users were tagging us in online. Seeing the joy from both GSAP and Webflow communities was incredibly special to me and the whole team behind this launch. 

We coordinated the rollout of several product features, specifically benefiting GSAP developers

The day prior to GSAP’s relaunch, we quietly launched our highly-anticipated Webflow site previews with custom code. This allows developers to preview custom code before publishing it on your Webflow site — including animations written with GSAP. 

Additionally, we made it easier to use previously paid GSAP Club plugins in Webflow by making them, along with GSAP’s core library, directly available in and hosted by Webflow. 

We also gave one of GSAP’s most popular plugins — SplitText — a massive glow up. Completely rewritten from the ground up, it now includes a significant number of exciting improvements designed with developers in mind — including a 50% reduction in file size, baked in accessibility for screen readers, and easy masking for advanced “reveal” effects. 

By tethering these features together, we wanted to signal not just a thoughtful product rollout but also our commitment to GSAP developers — in both the JavaScript library and in Webflow. And by taking the time to invest in GSAP improvements, we wanted to offer the first of many proof points that we’re deeply invested in GSAP now and in the future. 

We put our campaign in motion (literally) — and it drove record-breaking numbers

What’s an animation library announcement without a little…animation? Our Creative team knew the announcement called for their A-game, and they honed in on building a slate of highly-visual and animated promotion assets for this launch to not only highlight the heart of GSAP as a product feature, but to also engage and capture user attention. This launch was an overwhelming success, racking massive engagement numbers and breaking Webflow marketing records:

• A sizzle reel, accumulating 170,000+ views & 450 comments
• Webflow’s most engaged LinkedIn post of all time, which was reshared nearly 200 times 
• Our second-most viewed blog post year-to-date

This momentum also gave our team the opportunity to tease Webflow’s next-gen native interaction solution (coming soon!), and our Marketing team is able to use all of the high-performing creative and promotion assets in ongoing campaigns to sustain the energy and excitement in the following weeks and months.

We centered our campaign around creators and authentic community engagement

Knowing this announcement would resonate most with the developers building in GSAP daily, we knew it was important to connect with them on a personal level. This meant enlisting Cassie Evans (@cassiecodes) and Keegen Leary (@webisbae) — members of our team the Webflow and GSAP communities already know and love — to talk shop during the announcement video stream. We also put spotlight on the incredible work of GSAP creators in this video, which also gave us an opportunity to showcase the limitless power of Webflow and GSAP.

Additionally, we know how inspiring it can be when users can visualize what’s truly possible with a new product, tool, or feature. That’s why we tapped prominent, award-winning agencies like OFF+BRAND to create free cloneables and templates with GSAP to help lower the barrier to getting started, accelerating GSAP adoption in the process.

And to bring a little healthy competition and a hands-on element to this campaign, we hosted the Webflow x GSAP Community Challenge — in partnership with CodePen. The challenge consisted of four prompts over four weeks and gave creators a chance to design, build, have fun, and win big prizes. Partnering with CodePen ensured anyone — not just Webflow users — could participate, giving challenge participants the option of submitting a Webflow project or a CodePen demo.  

We designed an episodic launch strategy to keep our community buzzing

We knew this announcement was a major announcement relevant not only with Webflow users, but the entire community of creative GSAP developers. This informed each part of our playbook: coordinating feature launches, building motion assets, and creating community engagement opportunities related to the launch.

With so many moving parts associated with this relaunch, sustaining momentum, energy, and excitement was critical. This was more than a singular marketing moment; it was a campaign spread across multiple weeks, anchored around a massive announcement. 

Phase 1: GSAP is free announcement

We didn’t bury the lede: we shared the big news that GSAP was free with confetti and a full announcement post, provided updates about our improvements from GSAP and Webflow, and kicked off the community challenge. This gave us a launching point to promote our announcement video, which would stream on Webflow’s YouTube channel a week later. 

Phase 2: Scheduled video stream

From there, our video stream provided our community with a full breakdown of what this relaunch means for creative developers, and allowed our team to preview what’s next on the Webflow Interactions roadmap —generating even more buzz than we could’ve anticipated. We created a short clip from the video previewing the completely reimagined Webflow interactions experience (centered on a horizontal timeline interface), which received the biggest reaction from the community and was reshared over 100 times across social. Anyone who missed the video stream received the recording via email, extending its life and ensuring the asset appeared in front of as many eyes as possible.

Phase 3: Community challenge

A new prompt in our community challenge dropped every week for four weeks, and we were able to select and celebrate both winners and honorable mentions publicly across our social channels every week for the entirety of the month, as well as feature winning projects on the challenge landing page. Additionally, we’ll be spotlighting winners in an forthcoming content piece, giving a peek behind the curtain on how they brought their creations to life. 

This relaunch opened up so many creative possibilities for our community, and taking this sustained approach ensured it received — and continues to receive — the attention it deserves.

And what’s even more exciting is that we’re just getting started. 

The next chapter of Webflow and GSAP

Since I know many of you have already caught onto what we’ve been teasing… we will be releasing next-gen Interactions in Webflow — powered by GSAP — soon! This will empower anyone — marketers, designers, developers, and agencies — to visually build expressive, smooth, performant animations that aren’t just for flair, but fuel conversions. 

We hope this relaunch empowers more of the Webflow and wider creative developer community to build experiences that make a lasting impact. We’re always listening to your feedback and ideas to bring new products and features to life, and I’m incredibly grateful to our community for supporting us and championing our continued work to give development superpowers to everyone. 

To stay up to date on the latest Webflow product updates, visit webflow.com/updates.