How can anyone ever forget to launch? This sounds impossible, but it has certainly happened before. It’s one of the most important days in the history of any company, and yet I’ve seen this happen many times.
Here are the four most common founders who forget to launch:
The One More Feature Guy: Everything is built, tested, and launch-ready, but these people must add one more thing to the site or product that they feel will be “critical” to their success.
The Busiest Person on the Planet: These founders are always multitasking and bogged down by their to-do lists, and their own launch sneaks up on them.
The “What-if-my-baby-isn’t-pretty-enough” Founder: These people are afraid of rejection. They would rather not tell anyone what they’re working on than face the “real” world with their product.
The Ultimate Dreamer: They are so jacked up on their own hype machine that they think they can just push their website live and they’ll achieve maximum virality.
Bottom line: Getting your first 1,000 users is probably a lot harder than you think, and those users won’t find your site just because you have a clever domain.
So what should you do? How can you avoid the same fate as our four friends above?
It’s simple. You have to launch your product.
Your launch doesn’t have to include some major launch party or a TechCrunch article. You don’t even need to launch publicly. You just need to decide on a launch date with your team and make it happen — public, private, alpha, beta, call it whatever you want.
Once you launch, there is no going back. You can’t unlaunch. After you launch, try to bring on as many users as you can, gather as much feedback as you can, and then make improvements based on that feedback.
Ok, so now that you’ve committed to launch, it’s not as simple as saying that you’ve launched, right? Right. Now comes the difficult part. You have to get users, keep those users happy, make money, and run and grow a business.
It’s really tough and there are no silver bullets, but I would make sure you have very solid answers to the following before launch:
- Who is my very specific customer and how can I reach them?
- What problem am I solving for my customers and how am I different from the competition?
- What do my sales forecast and user growth look like in the first month, three months, and six months?
- What events, conferences, and meetups can I attend to help spread the word?
- Am I going to use any form of paid advertising? What are my budget, goals, and expectations?
- Who is responsible for marketing, sales, and PR and how much of their time is devoted to those activities?
- What is my strategy around press, blogs, publications, and the media?
- Do I have a plan for social media, specifically, what platforms am I going to focus on and how do I grow my presence there?
- How am I going to generate new qualified leads?
Some of these questions seem so obvious, but founders struggle with them all the time. If you don’t have a very specific customer in mind or you’re unsure how you’re going to find qualified leads, you will definitely need some help. Find a mentor, read some books, study everything you can about marketing, sales, and startup launches.
If you really want to know my secret to launching anything, it involves empathy.
At the end of the day, understanding the mindset of your customers is an important factor to launching your startup. Figure out how they’re going to react to your company, what will stop them from buying, and how to get them to become loyal customers. Once you’ve figured out your audience, you will be ready for launch!