I’ve barely been awake for 20-minutes and I’ve already been bombarded with an updated Twitter newsfeed of 140-character mind-regurgitations from no less than 200 people.
Unlike these never-ending distractions disguised as information, there’s another type of information that business-owners unequivocally consider a strategic asset, dubbed “business intelligence”– business data resulting from testing, surveys and all other forms of market research.
Business Intelligence is the new hottest resource in the startup community, and like other forms of information, there is certainly no shortage of it. Overall, this is a good thing that all businesses should be taking advantage of. Having some information is always better than having none at all, as information should lead to informed actions and allow startups to focus better, avoid missteps and scale faster. You also need to tread carefully.
The abundance of information could be paralyzing
There’s always one more report to pull. There’s always one more survey to send. There’s always one more question to ask. There’s always one more tweak to make and there’s always one more feature to build.
Sure, data should be gathered to strategically guide your business through the launch process, but it’s easy to take business intelligence a bit too far. When launching something new, some people get so excited (read: overwhelmed) by the choices and possibilities of their project that they forget that eventually, they need to, you know, actually launch it. Of course, it’s smart to make informed decisions, but between the data that’s already been captured as well as the potential data that needs to be gathered, it’s easy to fall into a self-perpetuating cycle of startup limbo and never actually launch — Founder’s Paralysis as I like to call it. Who can blame them?
It’s exciting to build something new, and it’s scary to release your project into the world. Why not prolong the feeling of “building something new” without taking that emotional risk as long as possible? Eventually, you need to launch, and if you’ve already gathered any sort of data and made subsequent tweaks and improvements, chances are you’re more ready for launch than you think you are.
Don’t focus on launching a perfect product
If you dismiss the first warning and plan to gather tons of data in order to improve your product as much as possible prior to launch, you should rethink your plan. After all, what is “perfect”? Does that imply you’re going to launch once and never add-on to or improve upon your initial product? Of course not. After all, as Winston Churchill said, “To improve is to change. To perfect is to change often.”
If you think you’re getting good data to work with while you’re still in pre-launch, wait until you actually launch– that’s when you’ll see some real actionable data to build an amazing product. When you finally launch, feedback both good and bad is going to come in. No matter how much business intelligence you gather and how much tweaking you do pre-launch, you’re going to quickly realize there are more features your customers would like to see, more marketing claims people want to hear, and more bugs to fix. Again, business intelligence is important — without it, you’re launching blindly while building what you think your customers will want and not necessarily what your customers actually want.
It doesn’t matter if you haphazardly launched your business, or beautifully conducted a methodical launch plan– there will always be a few more things you need to add or improve on, but you’ll never know what they are until you launch. So rather than delaying the launch process, you’re much better off launching sooner rather than later and making improvements based on real-life feedback.
Don’t focus on launching a complete product
Launching a 100% complete product is impossible. Look at Facebook, arguably one of the most successful businesses of all time. Some of their most iconic features did not exist until years into the business like Facebook messenger, photo tagging, status updates. All are now arguably essential features, but were they essential for launch? No. Waiting to launch until you implement all of your plans means you’ll always be moving the “GO” line forward, and you’ll never get off the ground, so make sure you understand the difference between what’s needed for launch and what’s needed eventually.
Don’t give up on press opportunities
Ok, so let’s say you dismiss the first three warnings, you launch a picture-perfect product that doesn’t need any improvements. You think you might’ve beaten the odds, but you unknowingly just put your business at another competitive disadvantage: a lack of press-worthy events. Bringing on new features and improvements is a great opportunity to reach out to your followers as well as journalists. As any marketing expert will tell you, if you have any legitimate reason to reach out and have a conversation with your email list or the press, you should take advantage of that opportunity. Launching with all of your features eliminates that opportunity.
So where’s the balance between launching in a timely manner and launching thoughtfully and methodically?
The successful startup launch formula
No two businesses are alike, so no two launch plans will be identical, but if you follow the general path of other successful startup launches, you can drastically improve your odds of a successful launch. Of all startup launches to mimic (imitation is the greatest form of flattery after all), I can’t think of a more savvy launch plan to follow than the one Ryan Hoover used to launch Product Hunt.
1. Prove the concept
So you have an intriguing idea you’d like to pursue? The key word here to recognize is “you”. You need to have a customer base beyond just “you” in order to build a business; otherwise, it’s just a hobby (which is totally fine, just call it what it is). Forget about being “too early” to talk to someone. Forget about someone stealing your idea. Whether your idea is a product, a service, an app, a website, whatever– you need to discuss your idea with others, preferably future customers, in order to get an initial sense of viability.
There’s plenty of quick and easy ways to get an initial sense of market viability:
- Purchase an ad on Facebook or Twitter that simply sends people to a landing page or coming-soon page, and see how engaging people are as far as click-through-rates on the ad or email sign-ups on the landing page.
- Use survey software to gather information from a targeted audience.
- If possible, build a very rudimentary version of your idea and test market reaction with a very small audience.
Ryan’s idea for Product Hunt was to essentially be a daily leaderboard for new products people haven’t heard of before. He envisioned it as sort of a reddit-style platform, but he also knew that building a platform with the capabilities he wanted would take time. But he didn’t want to invest before validating that people wanted a leaderboard to discover cool new products. Remember, you invest both time and money into a startup. You’re not reckless with your money, so don’t be reckless with your time.
Ryan decided that he could easily validate his concept by using Linkydink to curate a list of cool new products and distribute it via email newsletter to some family and friends he thought would be interested. After getting great feedback and witnessing strong growth in newsletter subscribers, he considered the idea validated, and he felt comfortable investing some time into building a preliminary web platform with basic functionality that would eventually be Product Hunt.
If there are no serious red flags at this stage of testing market viability, the next step is to prove that your business delivers value that people want. And the only way to do this is to launch your idea in the most lean, stripped down version possible and present it to a few select people to gather feedback and market data.
2. Build basic product and gather more feedback
Reid Hoffman, founder of Linkedin, said it best: “If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late.” Before you start building the first iteration of your product, think of a few people in your network who would really appreciate what you’re making, and build it for them. Try to include these people in every step of the building process, from design to functionality. This serves two purposes: first, by including others in the process, they will be more engaged in the overall process by providing better feedback. These people will eventually be your loudest supporters when it’s finally time for your public launch. Second, when you gradually introduce people to the building process, it will reduce any anxiety you might have when the private and public beta launches happen and virtually eliminate the risk of Founder’s Paralysis.
After proving his concept with successful email list on Linkydink, Ryan enlisted help from his friend Nathan Bashaw. In five days, they built a very basic yet functional version of Product Hunt and released it in three steps – the private beta, the quiet beta, and the public launch.
3. Private Beta and gather more feedback
Once you’ve built a very crude version of your concept, re-introduce it to your initial test audience, share with them the story behind what you’re doing, and work with them to get constructive feedback. At this time, it’s important to keep two things in mind: first, make sure to keep things private and within your core test community; and second, take all suggestions seriously and implement the changes you want to make quickly. At this stage, your biggest assets are excitement and agility. Keep your community excited by allowing them to see the concept evolve right in front of their eyes.
After Ryan had his basic product built, he sent it to his email list and asked them to engage on the platform and provide feedback. By limiting access, Ryan built up suspense for the public launch, while he improved the finer details of the platform.
4. Quiet Beta and gather more feedback
It’s important to keep the momentum going, and while it’s great to have a community that your friends and family are excited about, the key to remember is that a successful startup launch happens in phases.
At this point in the launch process, Product Hunt had about 30 users, and although there were still bugs to be fixed and user-experience improvements to made, Ryan knew that he needed to seed the community with more quality members before launching publicly. He hand picked more people to invite, which allowed him to gather more data and made improvements. A week later, he had about 100 active users.
5. Public launch and PR campaign
Up until this point, the launch plan has been very calculated and methodical, from hand-picking people to introduce to your startup to building up excitement within the small community of testers. The public portion of the launch is no different. It’s not as easy as just making your business available to the public– as many entrepreneurs find out the hard way. Unlike the Field of Dreams, if you build it, people will not necessarily come.
The most important thing about a public launch, assuming you’ve worked out as many kinks as possible and have improved the product is to be loud. Very, very loud.
Some ways to help announce your startup to the world include:
- Send out an email to your current community thanking them for their help, letting them know that the platform is ready to go public thanks to their help, and asking them to spread the word.
- Get press involved. If you personally know any journalists or bloggers, take them out for a drink and explain to them your business. Face-to-face is always the best option.
- Social media. Pour your heart out and literally ask for people to share your story.
It was at this point that Ryan felt comfortable launching to the public. He had worked out most of the bugs, and he was receiving consistent positive feedback from his community.
Ryan leveraged the power of the community he already built, but he also luckily had connections at PandoDaily, whom he wrote for in the past. He met with journalists there and introduced Product Hunt to them. The next day, Product Hunt was in the publication, and by the end of that day, Product Hunt had acquired it’s 400th user.
I don’t want to say Product Hunt got lucky in this situation, but for someone who doesn’t have connections in the media, it’s a lot harder to see press happen this quickly and this successfully. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying; it just means you might need to get a bit more creative in your public launch.
6. Force growth
Now that your business is now open to the public, this is not the time to celebrate just yet. This is when the real work starts. Paul Graham wrote a great piece on how early traction usually comes from doing things that don’t scale, an article I highly suggest everyone read.
Product Hunt’s brute force growth was no different. Although they had acquired valuable press and quick momentum when they launched, Ryan kept focus on improving the user experience. Many startups that land press will find out that a spike in traffic and awareness mean nothing if you’re not capturing those people and keeping them engaged. The only way to do this is to continually gather feedback and improve.
As you can see, launching a startup takes a lot of finesse. There is certainly no perfect way to launch a startup, but there is one constant in all startup launches – constant progress.
What are you waiting for?