The Best Time to Launch Your Application
…part II of our journey to grow by 10,000% in 2016
originally posted on the Mokumax blog here…
Today didn’t feel much different than other days when I woke up. I felt overwhelmed. I felt like I had too much on my plate and that I probably wouldn’t even make a dent in it.
I got dressed, grabbed some coffee and got in the car to take my daughter to elementary school. I walked her to the front door, told her that I loved her and gave her a kiss.
I got back in my car, took a breath and thought to myself about how lucky I am to be able to take the time to have these special moments.
I started my car and turned the radio on to XPN. David Bowie’s song Heroes was on. Awesome. I was inspired.
When the song ended I heard the news that David Bowie had just lost his battle with liver cancer. Sadness.
I was awake for 30 minutes and had already gone from being downbeat to grateful and inspired to sadness and a mournful state.
Now you know my state of mind this leads me to this…
When is the best time to launch your startup application?
If you want the short answer then you should follow the MVP methodology. Basically, you get the most basic features finished and then you go to market. There are advantages to this.
Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Advantages
- Get to market faster
- Learn what is most important to the end user
- Save time — reduce development time
This is what we are trying to do with our new product BlackBox. We were looking to release this to the public last week but I didn’t feel like the product was far enough along.
Since I wrote our marketing strategy for this year, some things have changed and our plan has been slightly tweaked. This is another reason why our launch has been delayed.
Adapting Marketing Plans To Real Life
Even at this early stage of launching BlackBox I am learning how important it is to have a plan. Our plan is pretty detailed. By trying to follow the plan to a “T” there were some necessary ch-ch-ch-ch-changes.
Adjusting the Launch Date
The first thing that needed to be updated was the actual launch date. Releasing a MVP is our plan but running some internal tests we found that we still weren’t quite ready. In addition to the product there were a ton of other things that really needed to be completed first. These things included updating our website to include BlackBox, marketing email copy, finding a free CRM, and finding a method for acquiring emails for our cold email campaigns.
We are realistic. We know we probably won’t get 100,000 sign-ups on our first day of launch but for those 100 people we want everything to work as promised.
New plan: We are launching in stages. We will be making special offers to our existing mailing list before we “officially launch”. If you aren’t on the list then you should sign up now. This week we’re sending out a great deal.
Keeping Traffic vs. Sending to Medium
Another change is that I’ll be blogging from the Mokumax Blog and then sharing the content on Medium instead of vice versa. We decided it’s best to keep the original content on our site. It really makes complete sense. We got caught up on the hype of Medium’s reach. We love Medium and want to have a voice there so this should work well.
A Free CRM to Track Emails
We were looking for a CRM that allowed us to send cold emails using templates. We found a few. Most are free for up to “x” amount of emails and users. We ended up choosingHubSpot CRM.
Keep in mind that we will not be bulk emailing anyone. We are sending emails to targeted individual emails with a specific email template. We have not used this yet but it looks like it will work perfectly.
Finding Email Leads
If you are looking to grab emails for potential leads then you should try Mark Helton’s Hot Lead Finder. I used this on a few keywords and I was able to grab over 500 records that I downloaded to an Excel spreadsheet. I have over 500 potential leads to filter through and then I’ll email them through HubSpot’s CRM using an email template we created. It’s still manual work since we are working out the process. Eventually, I’ll be able to hire a virtual assistant to do this for us for a couple of dollars per week.
Conclusion
What is becoming very clear to us is that there is no perfect time to launch. It all depends on when you feel you have a MVP. The bottom line is you need a plan.
Life is short so don’t wait too long or work so much that you miss out on the special moments like taking your little girl to school.
Thanks for reading. Share your thoughts below.
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All the best,
Craig
