3 Things I learned launching my product (so far)

I’m in day 2 of launching my awesome #StandardFeb product, Be Someone’s Valentine and I promised to blog as frequently as possible about what i’m learning. So here we go:

Driving traffic is HARD

Classic problem for a B2C: how do I get people to my site? There’s twitter, facebook, Instagram, et al so how do you drive people to your site? Honest answer: I still don’t know. I mean, I know how to do it over a longer term, but in a month long challenge on a limited budget? Beats me. I still need to find my viral hook — that thing that makes people want to talk about it

Converting people is hard too

That is, if you can drive people to your site, getting them to give you something ($$$) is tough too. I started using optimizely to see what people respond to. I have 90 page views in the last 24 hours and it looks like people don’t really get what i’m doing. And that’s ok. What I need to do now is refine the value props a bit and continue to test and set up “experiments” to see what is interesting. When We&Co, one of my companies, pivoted a few years ago, we literally went through DOZENS of A/B tests before we figured out what people responded to.

This shit takes TIME

You’d think after the numerous websites, products, companies, etc I’ve launched I’d remember how much time this takes. But I forgot. If you just kinda half ass launch something (which this admittedly is), it is almost mathematically certain to not succeed. It takes constant effort and attention to make something work. And since this is a fun side project, time and effort is something I do not have.

Ok, more to come tomorrow (maybe).