How to Effectively Launch a Product

Today I want to talk about how you should effectively launch a product, and when I'm talking about a product, it could be a service, it could be any of those things, but what's important is the sequence and how you do that, first and foremost, so that you have the most successful launch that you possibly can. But also, so you can de-risk any time investment, money investments, as much as you possibly can to create more certainty and therefore more profitability around what you're trying to do.

The first point here really is, think about having a marketing first philosophy. What I mean by that is, let's say you're going to create this product, it could be a physical product, you have to store it in a warehouse, you've got to get it made somewhere offshore in Southeast Asia. There's a lot of time, money, and investment that goes into that decision. 

What I see a lot of people doing is they go and firstly, get a prototype made, then they go and buy 20,000 stock units, all of these things before they've even gone out there and tested whether there is an appetite for that product in the market. This is fundamentally one of the worst things you can do. It's been talked about quite a bit, the first time I heard about the philosophy of marketing first, was actually from Tim Ferriss. He talks about in his book The 4-Hour Workweek where essentially he used that same principle when he was launching one of his first businesses, which was an e-commerce business. 

It made a lot of sense to me back then and that book is well and truly over a decade old, but there are still people out there who are going out there and investing, as I said, a lot of money in the product first, when actually you should be thinking about the audience, the market, the customers, and getting that proof of concept, what we call the product-market fit.

How do you do that?

First and foremost, you need to be able to get an audience if you like or be able to put the product or the idea out there and get some form of validation, some form of test. If you haven't got your own audience, you haven't built a brand, you haven't kind of got that, that list if you like, then the best way to actually do that is to partner with someone who is already speaking to the audience that you want to appeal to.

Sometimes you might have to do a commercial deal with that person to get access to their audience, but all you really want to do is almost like pre-launch your product, get a message out there, get an offer out there with the whole intention just to see what that appetite is like. Once you've done that, it’s going to give you more certainty to be able to go to the next step, which is obviously, potentially doing a more sort of formal prelaunch, giving some away, those sorts of things, building more momentum, building more interest. Once you start to do that, then you can go all-in if you like and start to order some products and start to get them created. 

But there's nothing better in my opinion, than using marketing to create desire and to create interest, intrigue if you like because lots of people have this psychology of both fear of missing out and sort of fear of wanting something, they want something now, it's what I call the culture of immediacy. The more that you can build up that expectation, get people having that sort of energy behind it, the more successful that you're going to be when you actually launch the product in its own right. So marketing first is very much about creating that demand as your first priority. 

Now, the other part I want to touch on today is, how do you start to build an audience if you haven't got anything now? Well, there's only really two ways to build an audience. You can either pay for that audience, you can buy it through advertising, go to the platforms where their audience is, but you have to pay for the right to do that. Or you have to do it by giving value, by putting stuff out into the world, which is offering enough value that people are going to be getting that, that sense that they can, know, like, and trust you. Then, of course, when you want to put something out there which is more commercial, an offer or something like that, then it's going to be more successful.

But of course, the problem with that second strategy is it takes time and it takes time to build up and it compounds, but they are your choices. But the key thing I want to get across today is, when you think about launching something, creating a product, definitely go a little bit wider, definitely think more about the audience, how you're going to reach them and do that first. If you do that, you're going to basically be more successful because you're going to know before you've invested most of your time, whether it's going to work or not. 

And ultimately when you launch, you'll get that ignition, you'll get that punch and you'll ultimately have a more successful launch because you've created that urgency and demand in advance.

Nick Bradley

Scale Up Your Business

www.suyb.global