"How to Build a Great Company" Series (12/18): GO LIVE (Stage 2)

Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final stretch of the LAUNCH stage of the 100 Tasks — Go Live! 

This last sub-stage of the LAUNCH stage is all about the many many (often forgotten) last things that need to be done in order to have a smooth and successful go-live. 

It’s not only an absolutely critical sub-stage, but it’s also a really exciting one! That’s because your launch in your first market is a unique opportunity for you to engage your potential customers and investors as well as to generate revenues. And it’s important to make a big splash and to hit the ground running!

There are five important tasks within Go Live. They fall into two categories — technical and non-technical:

• The technical tasks are tasks 62, 64, and 66
• The non-technical ones are tasks 63 and 65

Allow me to first briefly explain the technical tasks, to then go over the non-technical ones, and to finally illustrate those tasks through a real-life case. Without further ado, let’s jump into the technical tasks.

Task 62: Stress Test & Bug-Fix Across Functions

This task shows you exactly what you need to do in the last major step of the three-step product development cycle. Remember: 

1. The product manager specifies the product (Task 34: Specify MVP)
2. The engineers develop the product (Task 39: Develop MVP)
3. That’s this task right here! In this task, the testers or quality assurance managers (commonly referred to as QA managers) test the product and fix problems with it 

More specifically, this task will teach you the six-step stress-testing process and the four levels of testing. This task will also give you a useful pre-launch checklist on what really needs to work so that you have a smooth launch. 

Task 64: Start KPI Reporting

In this task, you’ll learn everything surrounding the start of KPI reporting, which happens on launch day! KPI reporting starts on launch day because that’s the day you start generating real customer data.

In other words, the daily, weekly, and monthly KPI reports that you created in the last sub-stage (Set Up KPI Reports) will start gathering real data on your launch day.

This task goes into detail on the reporting process (i.e. how KPI reports are best distributed and viewed). It also shows a reporting matrix that decides which stakeholders should get daily, weekly, and monthly reports. Lastly, this task explains the how and why of having one KPI owner per KPI. 

Task 66: Continue Testing &  Bug-Fixing

This task builds on Task 62 (Stress Test & Bug-Fixing Across Functions). That is, this task is also part of the third step of the three-step product development cycle.

Specifically, in this task, you’ll learn a clear framework for how to prioritize problems to be fixed. There will undoubtedly be many of those problems, commonly called bugs or errors. The severity of bugs should be one of the following (from most to least important/urgent): critical, high, medium, low. And you will need to allow plenty of time to work out the critical bugs (and to re-test them several times) before launch. 

It’s important for you to have this system for prioritizing bugs instituted in your company pre-launch, because once you launch and you’re dealing with real customers and you’ll have many more problems that you’ll have to prioritize and fix. Without such a proven system in place, you’ll drown in work and the customer experience will suffer.

Let’s now turn to the non-technical tasks.

Task 63: Prepare Press List

This task teaches you how to think about your Launch PR. Launch PR is its own category of PR because it’s so important. That’s because the launch of a venture or a product is always a rare opportunity for you to generate positive coverage. So, you should take full advantage of it!

In this task, you’ll learn to solve the Launch PR challenge backwards:

1. Ask yourself, Whose attention do you want to attract? Do you want to attract attention from customers? Or do you want to attract the attention from your investors? Or both?
2. Then, ask yourself, What are your specific customers and/or investors interested in exactly? In other words, how do you want to reach those people? Conduct research on which media and formats might be best to reach your potential customers or investors: e.g. newspapers, magazines, influencers, newsletters, startup news sources, industry publications, etc. That’ll be your press list!
3. Lastly, send your press kit to your press list. In this task, you’ll learn what exactly makes a compelling press kit

Task 65: Conduct Launch PR Campaign & Paid Marketing

It’s launch day!

To make it a proper launch day, two things need to happen:

1. PR Launch: The media channels you have reached out to as part of your press list air your story on launch day (Task 63: Prepare Press List)
2. Paid Marketing Launch: You start to implement your cross-channel marketing strategy with paid ads (Task 55: Prepare Cross-Channel Marketing Strategy)

To achieve your objectives, it’s important that you keep PR and marketing separate and to consider the objectives of each. That way you’ll keep your processes lean and scalable. 

• So, for example, lean more heavily on PR if your resources are scarce, you want to get the attention of investors more so than of customers, your product is complex and needs explaining, or you want to raise brand awareness
• Conversely, lean more heavily on paid marketing if you do have some resources, your product is pretty straightforward for consumers to understand, or you really want to instantaneously drive sales

Those are all of the technical and non-technical tasks of sub-stage Go Live. Now, let’s jump into the real-life case!

Case: Fast, big-bang go-live for Asian food startup

In 2017, Layla and Varun founded a food-delivery startup in the center of an Asian metropolis. Layla was in charge of the business/operations parts while Varun was in charge of the technical parts of the company. 

Their business model was different compared to the many food-delivery companies out there in that it owned and controlled a lot of the value chain. They had their own kitchens — at first only one kitchen — and their own riders. They decided on such an integrative business model for many reasons — chief among which were low labor costs and high quality control. 

In early 2018, Layla and Varun asked me to advise them on getting them to go-live — very quickly. 

By the time they contacted me, they had already been stuck in the LAUNCH stage for 8 months! They felt that they had been preparing for go-to-market “forever” and that the LAUNCH stage would “never end”. Not only had Layla and Varun become impatient, their angel investors had, too.

To compound their challenges, their super-extended LAUNCH stage caused them to be short on financial resources. Their runway was coming to an end.

Now the worst part: A heavily funded competitor just launched in the same central neighborhoods that we were going to launch in — one week before I joined. And that new entrant started its LAUNCH phase after Layla and Varun did. Thus, the competitor was faster — so far! But as we’ll find out, the competitor’s execution was much less sophisticated.

So, after some back-of-the-envelope analysis, we decided that we had to launch in only 10 days. And our launch had to be big and effective. 

So, what did we do? We mobilized our team to quickly implement the five tasks of the Go Live sub-stage:

Task 62: Stress Test & Bug-Fix Across Functions

The team stress-tested the key functions of the customer journey using normal and extreme test cases. For example, we tested extreme cases like this one: many “customers”, who live very far apart from one another, place wildly different orders at the same time. Our entire value chain had to be ready: both our customer app and our rider app had to be ready for high load, our processes in the kitchen had to be ironed out, and our riders had to be trained. Any launch-critical bugs — in our operational processes and in our tech stack — had to be prioritized and then fixed in the right order

Task 64: Start KPI Reporting

We made sure our daily, weekly, and monthly KPI reports were ready-to-go on launch day. We placed a lot of importance on the typical KPIs. Those include the likes of the number of orders, revenues, cost per order (CPO), customer acquisition cost (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), and net promoter score (NPS). But we also really looked at unique KPIs. Those included the number of orders per cook per hour, number of orders per driver per hour, and time to delivery

Task 66: Continue Testing & Bug-Fixing

As a natural consequence of the stress-testing (Task 62), we identified and then prioritized many bugs — especially in the operations (i.e. the kitchen and the delivery). Our team worked day and night to close 100% of the bugs with severity critical/high, 60% of the ones with severity medium, and 20% of the ones with severity low. The team constantly re-tested to really make sure that the bugs are actually fixed

Task 63: Prepare Press List

We first decided that we wanted to attract both customers and investors — but customers more. More importantly, however, we were determined to make a big splash on launch day and to communicate to customers and investors why we are better than that formidable competitor that was already in the market. As a result, we brainstormed which would be the best ways to reach those audiences. Since we didn’t have much time until launch, we focused only on digital media instead of print media. Specifically, we heavily incentivized local influencers in the food / health / restaurant space to partner with us. We also wanted to be in the major local digital newspapers. Lastly, to get investors’ attention, we also wanted to be in the regional startup press. Each medium had its own compelling pitch presented in the press kit

Task 65: Conduct Launch PR Campaign & Paid Marketing

On launch day, a ton happened. All of the right influencers skillfully promoted our deliciously presented dishes. They posted food selfies on Instagram and Facebook (with a tempting discount code for new customers). The city’s few major newspapers reported on our launch on their websites and apps. They used pictures of Layla and Varun in the kitchen with fresh ingredients and beautiful dishes. They also explained the founders’ highly personal founding story. The regional startup press aired the founders’ vision and explained their business model in detail. We also turned on highly targeted cross-channel paid marketing to get an initial boost of orders

The outcome was a successful, big-bang launch! We went live in only 10 days. We entered the market only 17 days after the first entrant. However, by being bold yet systematic, we made a much much bigger splash than they did. Our hypothesis was that in this winner-takes-all market, which food delivery usually is, starting with a bang is essential because of the powerful impression that a big launch makes on customers and investors.

The team hit the ground running. Only one month after launch, it was clear that Layla and Varun were far ahead and were winning the city’s food delivery war.

Both Layla and Varun learned that launching the right way is a huge source of competitive advantage. Despite being beaten time-wise by a formidable competitor, Layla and Varun were fast followers who launched in a much more focused and effective way.

Congratulations on completing the LAUNCH stage!

CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve done it! You’ve launched your venture in your first market! You completed all 5 sub-stages:

1. You temporarily staffed your venture with people from the launchpad
2. You specified, developed, and then tested your product
3. You built up all functions systematically — ensuring that you only do the must-haves, only what’s launch-critical
4. You set up your top 20 KPI reports
5. And you did all of the many last things that needed to be done in order to have a successful launch!

Now take a BIG breather. Because what’s next is the SCALE stage of the 100 Tasks. There you’ll face a new level of complexity. That’s because your venture is now live. That means that you’re dealing with real customers and new — often unforeseeable — challenges.