What is a Rocket Booster Challenge or My First Week at Launchpad
You might think joining a company launched by a big corporate like BP would feel bureaucratic, slow to decide anything and full of overwhelming processes. I admit I did. But it turned out not to be the case for Launchpad and me, and here is why…
I’m sure readers have lots of experience of brainstorming. In my humble opinion, it rarely generates actionable outputs — often just a list of good (or sometimes less good) ideas. Instead, in my first week at Launchpad, I was thrown into a Rocket Booster Challenge.
RBC is the hackathon-like framework used at Launchpad to get things done when there is limited time for planning; when your team needs to unite outside of official working hours (as everyone has their agenda filled during the day) and a problem needs solving. Of course, it’s usually better to organise your work and plan things but sometimes (sh)it happens, and we need to move things quickly.
Ok, let’s get into it.
Time: I joined Launchpad on the 21st of October. RBC took place on the 23rd of October.
Challenge: LYTT, one of our residents, was attending ADIPEC on the 9th of November. ADIPEC is one of the most important conferences in the Oil & Gas industry, and we needed to present LYTT to the outside world and get the attention of prospective customers.
Team: LYTT’s co-founders, Launchpad Marketing Director and Growth Hacker and content marketing partner (in our case it was an agency as we didn’t have a copywriter in place) joined a bunch of the technical talent from the LYTT team. Attendance was encouraged but voluntary.
Preparation: Deliberately very little; the main goal being to avoid intrusion into working hours. Just a bit of promotion with the team to encourage participation, e.g. the chance to collaborate with different people from the team, learn new skills, work at fast pace and the opportunity for the team to influence LYTT’s external presence.
On the Day: we gathered at around 6pm and listed the number of tasks we needed to do, divided the team in two groups and simply started DOING things. We ordered some pizzas and beer to keep everyone full of energy and happiness.
The goal was to stay as late as we needed to achieve the mission we set (we didn’t have an end time in our calendars but we all left about 11pm). The most important thing was to deliver actual shipments - that night. And come in the following day to see actual results.
What was done (some examples):
- We defined our target audience for the conference, their personas, needs and marketing channels to target the conference visitors;
- We created accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Mailchimp, Instapage, Optinmonster;
- We implemented tracking and integration and set-up campaigns on Facebook and LinkedIn;
- We created a dedicated landing page on Instapage to capture leads;
- We developed a sequence of e-mails on Mailchimp;
- On top of it we created a lot of content — both copy or and visuals to be used that night and afterwards.
Follow up: the Pareto principle worked for us — we did 80% of the work that night and the remaining 20% over the following days.
Results: we generated over 30 qualified leads for the sales team which led to two client meetings during the conference. We added more than a hundred followers on our LinkedIn page, trebled the number of website visitors and generated 150 signups to our newsletter.
We completed this mission in (almost) one night meaning work on many different fronts: research, content, tech, processes, conceptual work, strategy, design, organisation. I would never expect to work on such broad number of tasks on my third day of employment at a corporate. But that happened to me and it was the moment when I realised I’ve entered a true start-up, with a growth mindset mentality where Launchpad acts as a servant to its Residents by dropping everything to focus on helping them to achieve their business goals.
Ira Krachanovskaya
Launchpad, building new energy businesses.
