- It used to be that if you wanted to launch your startup,
there's this playbook around,
you would build the product.
And you would build, build, build, build and build,
maybe do some customer discovery along the way.
And then you would go for the sales and marketing big push,
you would get on TechCrunch,
you would do the big press release,
and then boom, you'd get hunted
and you get 10,000 users.
The reality is, launches aren't really a thing anymore.
So what do you do?
And how do you launch your startup
in a world where big bang launches
don't really work anymore.
That's what I'm gonna be walking you through,
in this episode.
I'm gonna be giving you my three principles to follow
to actually launch your startup
within a three-month period, the right way.
Intro.
(upbeat music)
What's up everybody, welcome to unstoppable
I'm TK, author of the book
"How to Punch the Sunday Jitters in the Face",
entrepreneur and SAAS startup founder.
I also happen to run the SAAS startup school
where we work with startup founders like you.
And help you go from zero to three million ARR real fast.
If you are new to this channel,
welcome to our unstoppable movement.
I dropped an episode every Sunday
and every Wednesday to help startup founders like you
become unstoppable in your life and your business.
So be sure to hit that subscribe button
and that bell icon so that you're notified
when I drop a video with the TK energy.
Okay, so let's dig in.
So you have a startup and you wanna go do a launch
and you're starting to realize
that just building product and then going
for a big bang launch isn't the thing anymore.
This is the core of what I teach
in my SAAS startup school.
The biggest aha moment that I've had
through my ToutApp journey,
which I took from zero to seven millionaire ARR
and my Marketo journey, Marketo bought ToutApp
and I was served as VP of strategy
is that you got to build an audience
before you build a product.
The old way used to be where you did a big bang launch.
The new way is you build an audience
and as you're building that audience,
you build your product alongside it
and therefore you do it in a much more validated way.
And therefore when your product is ready,
you don't do a big bang launch,
you keep doing mini launches
to get your audience to buy into your product.
If you're interested in digging
into how to actually do this,
go ahead and smash that like button.
And let's go through the step by step process
on how to actually do this the right way.
Now, when it comes to a launch,
and when it comes to a product
that gets to product market fit,
there's three important components.
There is market, there's go-to-market,
and there's product.
Most entrepreneurs and I'm guilty of this
as an engineer turned to startup founder,
as an engineer turned CEO,
is that we tend to over-index on product.
Even once we've launched,
we think growth comes from that one extra feature.
In reality, what I learned the hard way
is that you gotta build out your market strategy
and your go-to-market strategy
alongside your product strategy.
So if you're thinking about launching your startup,
here's how I would do it.
So the way I would do it is I would split it up
into three months.
Month one, I would actually focus on market and GTM.
Month two, I would still stay focused on market,
and GTM and add a little bit of product.
And then month three,
I would go full force on a mini launch
where I do the product to my audience.
And my audience is what I've built
by focusing on market and GTM.
Let me explain.
The first thing that you do
in actually making this whole thing work,
I call this the unstoppable sales funnel,
and the whole process works
because you're building out an audience
and then giving that audience the product that they need
instead of the other way around,
because then you end up with a solution
looking for a problem.
So the way we do this is number one,
you actually figure out your target market first,
you figure out your TAM.
You figure out your ICP,
your ideal customer profile,
and you actually figure out your narrative.
And that's essentially how you describe the problem
and the solution that you're taking into this market.
The big problem that they have,
the big macro trends that are going on,
that's part of your narrative.
Once you've figured out your market,
then before you build out your product and your solution,
you figure out your go-to-market.
Your go-to-market is your one unstoppable sales funnel.
Now, if you don't know what an unstoppable sales funnel is,
it means that you're probably new to our community.
That's okay, I did an entire video
on how to create a sales funnel that you can check out here.
You don't have to go there right now.
I'll link to it below, okay?
Now, here's the thing.
Here's the difference.
The difference here is instead of building a product,
what you start with is you build an audience
between getting very crystal clear on your market,
and getting very crystal clear
on how you actually mobilize that message
to build an audience using an unstoppable sales funnel.
You start to actually get real people
and real sales conversations that you can get yourself into.
When you get into that,
when you get into this audience,
you're able to really dig in
to the most important problem to solve.
And more importantly,
if you already have a product
with the beginnings of a product,
you can start to get real feedback
and get into real sales conversations with this audience.
And what's the difference
between doing customer development and an audience?
The difference is trust.
The difference is relationship.
Now you can go and just go talk
to a group of people and say,
hey, we're thinking about building this product.
Do you think this is important?
Would you be interested in trying it out?
The reality is, they're gonna be very nice to you.
They're gonna try and say, yeah, that sounds great.
But until they actually enter into a transaction with you,
you won't really know if they're telling the truth.
This is why I always put market and go-to-market first.
Because what you're doing here
is you're building a movement.
You're actually saying this is our unique point of view.
This is why we're building the product.
Are you into this tell us more about what you think
and you're building that relationship
and you're building a trust
before you even build your product
or alongside building your product.
When you do it this way,
you end up with an audience that trust you,
when you have an audience,
a core audience that you're growing that trusts you,
they're more likely to tell you the truth
about what they really need about your product,
what they really need from your product,
and whether the problem you're solving is important enough.
And as you start to do this,
you end up with an audience.
When you get that audience,
that's where you go into month three,
not only do you start building the product in month two,
by month three, you can go to that audience
with your initial product
and say here's our initial product,
can you try it out, and by the way,
pay us three bucks a month or $9.99 a month.
We'll build it over time.
But that solves the core problem
we've been all been talking about.
And that's where product comes in.
When you start to do it this way,
something magical happens,
you end up with the trifecta.
And the trifecta is you get a match between the market,
the go-to-market messaging, and the product.
And this is your initial version of product market fit.
Now look, part market fit is an entire journey.
But when you actually start to codify your market
and your go-to-market in a cohesive way
and you build that audience.
And then you start to ask them, what do we want,
and then you start to build a product,
you don't need to do a crazy big launch anymore.
You do a bunch of little launches
with your product as you build it
with your audience as you build it.
And that way, you start to get to product market fit
in a much more controlled way.
So let me just pause here for a second.
If you're starting to get the difference here,
if you starting to get the difference
on how this is a very different model
on how to build a product,
how to get to product market fit
how to get from zero to three million ARR
and actually do a launch,
we start to see the difference here.
Can I just get a yes in the comments below?
And by the way,
if you are in this journey right now,
I have one more thing I wanna show you,
but before I do that,
if you are this journey right now,
and you start to build out your product,
you wanna build up you go-to-market
and your market strategy.
If you wanna do that, I have a 45-minute training,
go-to-market training on how to build
an unstoppable go-to-market machine.
If you're on that journey
and you wanna dig more into it,
just go follow the link below, I've linked to it below
and you can go do that 45-minute training
that digs more into how to build out this market
and this go-to-market strategy
and why you need to do it this way.
Okay, so now you do this market,
you do this go-to-market,
that's month and month, two, right,
month, one and month two.
By month two, you wanna start doing product.
And month three,
you wanna continue building product,
but you wanna do a mini launch
of the basic core product that you've done,
and that validates whether what you're building is real
or not with your audience.
So now there's a core thing
about your product strategy here.
Here's the thing.
With market, you wanna figure out your ICP,
your ideal customer profile.
There's a very specific way to do that.
If you don't have an ideal customer profile yet,
I did an entire video on this ideal customer profile.
You can check that out.
Don't worry, I'll link to it below.
There's a very specific way
to build an unstoppable sales funnel.
I'll link to that below as well.
When it comes to product.
It's super important to not get over bloated with product.
As an engineer either I always thought
I was always at one feature away from getting
to that growth and that like, boom.
That's never the case,
it's actually just one core loop.
So if you think about it,
your ICP has this problem.
And your product gives the solution.
The thing that you really wanna measure
is the number of clicks to aha.
There's a certain aha moment
that your audience is gonna get to
when they use your product.
And a lot of what you're doing in these early months
is figuring out how to reduce those number of clicks.
So that way, when you go to your audience,
and you say, hey, we've been talking
about this big macro problem and we wanna solve it,
we have a unique point of view,
by the way of the software that solves it.
Are you interested?
And they say, yes, I'm interested,
and they get into the product.
You need to figure out how many clicks it takes
to get to that initial aha moment.
And that is what product strategy is all about.
So there's specifics on market
and go-to-market on how to get that strategy, right.
But there's also specifics on product.
And remember, there's a reason why I say ship code
and close deals because the ship code,
it doesn't mean you need to ship more features.
You know, there's gonna be a month four, month five here,
it doesn't mean you need to actually build more features,
what you need to be doing is shipping code
that actually improves the number of clicks it takes
to get to that aha moment.
That's how you get to product market fit.
Now, that could be a feature.
But more often, it's taking a core feature you have
and making it easier to understand and easier to use,
and making it more compelling for your audience
to go from problem to solution.
And when you get these three aligned perfectly,
that's where you get to this green zone.
And this green zone is what puts you on rails
and helps you go from zero to three million ARR real fast.
So that's my strategy on how to do a launch in three months.
And to recap, month one, build an audience.
How do you do that?
You clarify your market strategy,
and you go-to-market strategy,
and you build your audience
using an unstoppable sales funnel.
Month two, you continue to build your audience,
and based on the conversations you have with your audience,
you start to build product.
Month three, you continue to build your audience,
and you do a mini launch of your product
into your audience, into your audience only.
And that way you get more qualified sales conversations,
leads, pipeline, and perhaps revenue,
and that allows you to continue to improve on the product.
As you do your market strategy
and go-to-market strategy and build your audience,
you wanna hone in on your product strategy.
Your product strategy is reducing the number
of clicks to aha moment.
You do those three things
over and over and over and over and over again,
you get to three million ARR real, real fast
'cause you'll be able to adapt
based on real sales conversations.
Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg on how to do this.
If you're looking to do a three-month launch,
if you're looking to build an unstoppable sales funnel,
if you wanna run this system,
this way new way of doing product launches.
If you wanna launch your startup in three months
and do it the right way,
I have a 45-minute training on how
to build an unstoppable sales and marketing machine,
how to actually build this market and go-to-market strategy.
So I invite you to join this completely free,
45-minute training, just follow the link below,
or just go to TKKADER.COM/SAAS-TRAINING.
When you do that, I'll let you in to my 45-minute training
where I'll walk you in depth into why this system works
and how to actually build pieces of this out.
And lastly, if you liked this video
and got value from it,
please smash that like button.
If you have a founder friend that would get value
from doing a launch this way,
share it with that person as well.
And lastly, remember, everyone needs a strategy
in their life and their business.
But when you are with us,
yours is gonna be unstoppable.
I'm TK and I'll see you in the next video.
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