Getting Ready to Launch. What comes next?
You’ve been working for months. Your product is beautiful, and you’ve tweaked it several times as you’ve learned what your customers want. It’s time. You need to get ready to launch.
Just flip the switch right? Flip that magic switch that turns your product on, and then your customers will come flocking to it as they are persuaded that they should use your product. If only it worked that way.
You still have more work to do, and we’ll be spending the next several weeks discussing what you should consider before you go live. I like to break this phase of the project down to five work efforts that will make your life manageable as you bring your baby into the world.
Testing
And you thought you were done testing! At this point, you know that you have a product that works; otherwise, you wouldn’t be shooting to launch. However, you still need to test the product on multiple browsers and devices, make sure that your services can all run and you need to set up monitoring for the service itself. Next week we’ll be discussing the tools that you can use to do all of this.
Value
You need to set a price, even if what you are doing is going to be given away. It may seem a little counter-intuitive, but setting a price has this magical effect of helping you take yourself seriously. I’ve seen this have a dramatic emotional impact on founders. You take the time to build the thing and then put a flag in the grown that says this thing is worth this much and you will pay me for it. On the one hand, it will be encouraging and exciting, and then the market will show you how far off you are.
Content
Inevitably, you need more content. You should plan on the fact that you don’t have enough. Now’s the time to consider a help section for your site. What can articles and or videos you create that people can turn to so that they can learn about what the product does without having to bug you about it? You should also consider your legal documents as well as your policies and procedures. If you are shipping products, you’ll need your shipping policies as well your return policy.
Strategy
Just cause you’ve built, it doesn’t mean they will come. When we get to the strategy, I’ll show you some simple documents you can use to plan what you are doing and how that can get customers. Product strategy is a beast unto it’s self, but with a few simple tools and much work you can support your product without just launching it into the void and hoping for the best.
Learning
Finally, you have to have a way of documenting what you are learning. To me, this is the fascinating part of the whole process of product development. You have created this thing and have started a grand experiment, and now you need to test the idea and learn how it works. Moreover, when it doesn’t, you get to conduct experiments to figure out what is happening and how you can change it.
So, while you are not ready to launch, the steps you have in front of you are doable with some good old-fashioned elbow grease. Especially in the beginning. You may end up hiring a firm to do this in the future, but for now, you can manage the work and get this product ready to launch. I’ll show you how in the next few weeks.
Join the Conversation
This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
