Five Tips for Making the Most of Your Product Launch
So you’ve been heads down building code for the past few months, testing and receiving feedback from a small group of users, and are finally ready to share with a broader audience. How do you know you’re ready?
Most founders never feel ready. In most cases, having an MVP you’re proud of where you think you can learn something from shipping it is a good sign that you’re ready. For a consumer facing company, this may mean allowing public access — publishing on the app store, opening up your website, or allowing orders for the hardware. For a b2b company, this may mean allowing a larger set of users within a target customer to access the product, or moving beyond your first pilot to a larger set of potential customers.
At RDV, we’ve worked with more than a hundred companies at the university level as they think about how to come out of stealth and publicly launch their company. When it’s time to push the product live, it’s important to think through the process for building awareness, generating buzz and distributing the product among your target audience. Here are some best practices and considerations:
- Define your goals 📝
The goal of pushing a product live may include gaining new and diverse customers or users, attracting interest from potential investors, recruiting top talent to join your company, or landing new partnerships. Be sure to draft the specific goals and set metrics that you are looking to meet. It may be a combination of each, but you should have a primary objective, followed by secondary beneficial outcomes.
2. Decide on your type of launch 🤔
Companies may pursue a soft launch or an official launch. During a soft launch, a company generally shares a limited version of the product to a select group of people. This is a more targeted approach where you have more control over who you reach, the geographies, etc. In contrast, an official launch will open up your product to anyone interested and is often associated with a specific date to generate buzz both by potential users and by the press.
3. Base your press strategy around your target audience 📰
Upon launching, getting a news article written about the team and/or product can help boost interest and generate awareness. It’s important to think through important questions such as pursuing local or national publications, and whether you should focus on niche or more mainstream sources.
You may decide to focus locally at first, to ensure the launch goes smoothly in a specific location before pursuing a larger audience. With this approach, focus on local publications and groups who will become first adopters to the product. Alternatively, you may decide that you will learn more from adding a breadth and diversity of new users, opinions, and connections. This is when to pursue national publications and platforms.
At the same time, you may prefer to focus on more niche channels specific to your industry or vertical. If you are building a healthcare product and your goal is to reach as many physicians as possible, this may be a better approach than a mainstream publication where maybe only 5% of readers are physicians. In contrast, if your product is intended for broader audiences, mainstream press may be the best focus.
When founders think of getting press, they often think of getting featured in The NYTimes or TechCrunch. Mainstream platforms like these may be great for garnering broad interest, which may be helpful if you’re launching a messaging app or something that will appeal to general masses. But if your customers or users aren’t consuming information from these outlets, you may want to go elsewhere. For example, if you are building a healthcare product and your goal is to reach as many physicians as possible, a mainstream publication where only 5% of readers are physicians may not be your best bet. In the healthcare space, focus instead on a publication like MobiHealthNews. If your company is in the developer space, try Hacker News or SlashDot.
4. Spread the word with an influencer list and distribution plan 📬
Whether you decide to pursue press or not, a good way to share your product launch is by leveraging influencers. As an early stage company, you naturally will not have a following or large audience to leverage (yet!). But there are plenty of people that are willing to evangelize you and your company at the time of launch. They could be investors, advisors, or industry veterans. Additionally, build a list of people, whether classmates, local tech communities, or friends and supporters. Be sure to share the news with them and ask them to share the word. Finally, check out niche newsletters that syndicate content. Leverage your university! They will be proud to support your work in the campus paper, or across newsletters and list-servs.
With this list, package up the link to your product or article/blog post with context in a way that is easy to copy, paste, and share. Ask each group to spread the word via e-mail, blogs, social media, etc.
5. Be prepared and capture interest 🚀
All founders hope that in the weeks during and after their launch, they will become inundated with prospective customers or users. In this case, the worst thing that could happen is that your product, website, etc cannot handle the additional inbound interest. Invest additional resources and test them out. Backup your files and databases. Check for caps on data. Check in with your CDN provider on your plans.
With an increase in traffic to your website, app, or product, be sure you are collecting all intent, even if all customers/users don’t full convert. Have a way to capture information such as their email address so you can follow up and re-engage them.
If you’re a student looking to take your startup, company or project to the next-level, drop us a line & let’s explore what we can build together.
