The Agony of Startup Product Launches
Plus a Seven-Step Process to Follow
By Jay Acunzo, NextView’s VP of Platform (prev. Google, HubSpot)
The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony.
It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming. You bite and scratch and claw at everything until, mercifully, you’re ready to go live. Except … wait a second:
Will this thing even take off when we launch? Did we think through how to launch a product in the first place?
When I worked for a Series A startup in 2011, a launch plan looked something like this:
We’d throw absolutely anything and everything at the wall. But we’d have no plan — just an overabundance of excitement. We had no process, no measurement, no awareness of just how important it was to move from that splatter above to something more paint-by-numbers. Predictable growth? Forget about it. Scalable process? Not in a million years.
So we tried to make up for it using sheer force. Put content in every social channel. Announce things to every media outlet who had any readers, whether or not they were the right leaders.
Perhaps the worst part was the measurement thing: We’d throw stuff at the wall like many startups, but we wouldn’t be overly concerned with finding something that stuck. We’d spend literally weeks agonizing over the product or the content we were about to launch, and then hurtle it like some kind of chum into the water and just hope and pray it attracted the relevant aquatic life needed to support our business.
(Note: We served humans, not fish. By the way: I don’t advise coffee-fueled analogizing.)
Here are some of my favorite tactics that we tried for launching products or new marketing campaigns. And by favorite, I mean the exact opposite of favorite:
- Paying a non-trivial amount of money to a service that would get celebrities to tweet your product. Our celeb du jour? Lindsay freaking Lohan. Welp!
- Handing out flyers on the streets of Boston to potential users. (This tactic worked surprisingly well to gain initial traction. But like so many of these non-scalable things, the goal isn’t to do them for their own sake, but to do them to survive and advance. And THAT requires finding a channel or approach that DOES scale…which we never thought to explore.)
- Giving away huge prizes to engage with our product, which was a contest and sweepstakes platform, so this fit. (What we DIDN’T test for until a year or so later was that smaller dollar amounts closer to $100–300 actually converted users better than larger, thousand-plus amounts. The psychology is fascinating, no? Our assumption was that these felt less spammy and more attainable, thus increasing the trust a user had to click a marketing message and the confidence they had in actually registering. They believed it was both a genuine product and a better use of their time.)
- Buying traffic from sites that made up the “underbelly of the web.” If this were today, it would be sites that mimic Upworthy and Viralnova in low-quality ways. They basically game systems to gain lots of traffic, then point that traffic to suggested content, thus getting paid on clicks. We would be some of those clicks. Again, this was an early, scrappy tactic that worked…for topline numbers only. Almost all of these users would churn after their first day or week. Did we get out from under this? No. We kept buying these users. They kept registering. We kept quoting big user numbers to investors and partners. And then the users would churn. So we’d repeat. It was like digging a hole in dry sand.
My point in revealing this is to underscore one troubling reality:
Many startups have a smart, consistent approach to product development and design but lack such a plan when it comes launching and initial product marketing.
And given all the agonizing over BUILDING the thing — product, feature, content, campaign, etc. — you’d think we’d all wake up to the fact that the launch plan deserves just as much love and attention. (In my estimation, this separates the truly great early-stage founders and teams from the rest. They think about and master distribution. They have a plan to launch, and they know how to look for repeatable, scalable processes to acquire customers and grow.)
Smarter People Than Me: Please Save Us!
Luckily, the good folks at Driftt (unquestionably smarter than me, and smarter than most, too) put together this great SlideShare below. The slides detail how companies can be strategic and thoughtful about their product launch plans. (Note: NextView is an investor in Driftt.)
I’d highly recommend flipping through it, saving it, and sticking to this plan whether you’re a first-time entrepreneur or a veteran who’s launched many products. Either way, you’re more likely to be process-oriented and figure out what works more quickly.
Good luck!
View the SlideShare here. (Hat-tip to Dave Gerhardt, David Cancel, Elias Torres, & the team at Driftt for creating this great resource!)
NextView is a high conviction, hands-on seed investor. We believe there’s enough knowledge and entrepreneurial firepower in the world today to warrant a go-to hub for “zero-to-one” problems, challenges, and community. The site is LIVE, but we’re continuing to build what is still the early version.
Here’s how to stay up to date and help us grow this central resource:
- Subscribe if you haven’t yet (one email per week).
- Share with others in tech who would benefit.
- Write for us! Send me (Jay) an existing blog article you’d like to syndicate or an idea for an original piece — either way, it should be dedicated to helping seed-stage startups through advice, templates, processes, or stories. (See our topics categories here. This is about more than just customer acquisition.) Email platform@nextviewventures.com
