How to launch a product — My startup experience

Launching a new product is one the most crucial jobs of an entire product development lifecycle, and hence, it becomes very important to develop a foolproof product launch strategy along with the product development. It becomes altogether more challenging if a brand new product is developed by virgin start-up as neither the product nor the company has been exposed to the customers so far.

During my MBA, I learnt that building trust with the existing and prospecting customers is the backbone of any business and there are two ways to win the customer’s trust -

a) By a great product which reciprocates a great customer experience.

b) By great marketing strategy.

Post my MBA, I got a wonderful opportunity to launch a pharmaceutical product. This product was new in the US market and the goal was to increase the company’s revenue by selective and targeted selling of the product. For every product manager, identifying the goal is the first and foremost step and therefore, I started working by keeping this goal in my mind. While working with the team, I created product launch roadmap and as a part of our launch strategy, we decided a pre-launch and then final launch. With Indiegogo pre-launch campaign, we raised $20,000 on day1 which was not only a great achievement but also a proof of customer validation.

I would like to share my experience of how I launched the product successfully in the US market. One thing to keep in mind is that the product strategy should always be customer centric. In our case, customer testimonials were the most important asset. An existing positive testimonial gives confidence and builds trust for the prospective customers.

The best practice is that basic product strategy should already be defined before or during the product development stage. In our case, following checkpoints from the product roadmap were already completed by the time I reached to product launch:

• Market survey for the product need — What problem we are solving?
• Target market identification
• Target customers — their demography and behaviors
• User personas
• Competitive analysis
• Product positioning
• Product development and validation/testing
• A great website and mobile app with customer testimonials

So, keeping those points in mind, my focus was to increase the product sales for the Indiegogo pre-launch but before that, there was a requirement of diverting enough traffic to the website. And thus arose the question, how to build/increase website traffic?

Inbound sales funnel is a great tool for increasing traffic and conversion. It is important to note that the use of this funnel varies per the business need and goal. Considering our S&M budget Vs. customer reach, we decided to move with online marketing first.

1. Increase customer awareness: A big question was how can we reach out to maximum customers? Since our target audience is the middle aged, athletes, and the elderly people, we decided to market on following channels:

• Social media: Facebook was a key channel for bringing new customers. Launching promotional campaigns, live seminars, weekly contests were helpful to reach out to new people. Twitter was helpful in finding doctors, influencers, and bloggers. These people, if interested, can promote your product to the large audience since they have a large number of followers.
• Display: Running media/video display campaigns on Youtube and other relevant platforms was also helpful in bringing traffic to the website.
• News/media promotions: News broadcasting was very beneficial as the product information reaches to a large audience. However, for other products, the success would depend on the number of people who watch TV Vs. the broadcasting price.
• Blogs: Third party blogging and sharing those blogs across different channels is another great way to reach people. Use hyperlinks and backlinks to the website.

There are other channels which I didn’t use but they can play an important role depending on the type of business.

• SEO/SEM
• Meetups
• Public seminars/presentations
• Affiliates
• Outbound marketing

The most important thing for a PM/marketing manager is to define per channel performance metrics to decide which channel is performing better and where to invest more. There are awesome tools available in the market such as Google Analytics and Adomety which solve this problem for you.

2. Increase conversions: Once the website started getting traffic, the next important thing was how to convert maximum visitors? I realized that most of the interested visitors were visiting the website and therefore, it became important to build a great landing page and website. A/B Testing aka Split testing is one of the most powerful tools to see which version of the experiment is doing better. I used both Unbounce and Optimizely for running split tests. Conversion optimization takes time and A/B tests were very helpful in increasing conversions. How I performed A/B tests will take another big section so I will write on that separately but for now, I can only tell what I tested to increase conversion.

• New landing pages
• Banner text
• LP content
• Call-to-actions
• Page color combination etc.

In this whole journey, Google Analytics was my best friend for data analysis and to analyze what’s working and what’s not. I also optimize checkout and pre-checkout pages since checkout process was not user-friendly and I realized not many people were finally buying the product after reaching to the checkout page.

3. List building and Sales: In my case, I built a list of influencers, doctors, promoters, potential customers, weekly winners, and existing customers throughout the marketing campaign. This list was of great help during pre-launch and final launch notifications to the people. List building is the most powerful tool for any business to grow. I used Mailchimp, which is an awesome tool for email marketing. I created many personalized email campaigns during different occasions to remind people about our existence. But the key here is not to bug people by sending emails repeatedly.

4. Pre-Launch: So far, This overall process started bringing enough traffic to the website. The next step is the Indiegogo pre-launch. The benefit of Indiegogo campaign is to help in scaling up product’s manufacturing and validating product’s success simultaneously. I designed the campaign and routed all the website traffic to the IGG campaign. On Day1, the revenue generated was $20,000. This did not only validate our product and overall sales model but also generated enough funding to scale up the product manufacturing.

5. Final Launch: During pre-launch, it made sure that we are going on the right track by getting enough traction from the customers. For final launch, we needed to decide two things:

• Where to launch- The channels
• How to launch

We have decided the following three channels to sell our product and decided to leave retail channels for now.

1. Online — Website, social media
2. Amazon
3. HCPs (Health Care Professionals)

And advertised our launch on the following:

• News channel
• Healthcare publishers
• Affiliate blogs and content writers
• Through an email campaign to our existing/potential customers list
• Designed a graphics and shared on all our social media pages

But this is just a beginning of a new product in the market. There is a whole new game post product launch. Measuring the success and redefining strategy and features being one of them. Now, since I am writing without taking any pause, I feel like there is so much more to cover and I did not go in every detail. However, I will keep on writing about my product management experiences/learnings going forward. See you soon. :)