- Launching your startup,
probably one of the most important things
to get right so that you can get
as much momentum, as much people to show up
to actually use your product or service.
You know, I've been doing companies now for 15 years
and one of the things that I've really tried to figure out
is, how do you launch, and what does a launch mean?
Some people think that a launch
is going crazy open in public about your idea
and making sure that you get covered
by the New York Times and your local radio station
and the TV and all these different places,
but to me, I feel a launch
is actually broken down into three parts.
The key really is about leveraging the "newsworthiness"
of launching your company or being new,
and that's why it's called news,
so that you can get as much press and attention
and people talking about you,
to get people to show up to your door.
So the key at first is to do a soft launch.
When you're building your company,
you don't know if what you're selling,
your product, your restaurant, whatever it is,
you don't even know if it's good yet.
So the last thing you wanna do
is do this crazy, blown-out launch
and get everybody to show up,
when you can't even get your stuff delivered on time,
you can't even fulfill the promise
that you made on your website.
So a soft launch, you see this happen all the time,
in retail environments, online within tech companies,
where they'll build a list of people
that have shown interest,
100% through word of mouth.
Maybe a restaurant opened up,
but they're not really officially open.
They're doing their grand opening later.
That's an opportunity for you to take those people
and kind of move them through a process
of understanding how the experience went,
getting that feedback, tweaking,
and that is what I call a soft launch.
And as a technology company, that's what we do.
We get people to subscribe to our list,
we invite five a day, and those five people sign up,
use the product, give us feedback.
By going through that process
over a two to three-month period,
that's how you start to refine
what's called the onboarding experience,
or the first-time user experience.
So, a soft launch is perfect for that.
Do you get press for that?
You can get some people tweeting,
you can get people writing blog posts about it,
you can get early adopters sharing it on Facebook,
but no, you don't really wanna get press.
And because you're not letting people sign up directly,
then it's not, from a news point of view,
it's not considered press.
So that's a perfect opportunity
to kind of get people giving you feedback on the product,
but it's not news yet,
because you haven't opened it up to the world.
It's also a really good strategy
if you're thinking of raising money at some point,
to get investors interested.
I'm gonna say this quickly,
I don't wanna go off on a tangent,
but there's two times to raise money.
There's before you actually launch the product
and after the product's launched
and it's working really well.
And any other time in the middle there is really tough.
So using that soft launch and that opportunity to learn,
as well as really perfect what is gonna then be
what I call the big launch.
And that big launch could be six months to a year
after you've actually started the company.
Some people that are in the lean startup
or the launch early and often space
of being like, "Oh, that's too long."
I totally disagree.
I think that you can be in that iterative process
of taking people that have shown interest early,
walking them through and getting that feedback
and kind of continuing through that cycle,
for six months, a year, no problem,
so that when you finally do launch,
when you open up your doors and you get all the press,
the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
all these people, the TV news station,
Oprah's calling to have you on her show,
the product rocks.
That is the big launch, and that could be,
again, six months or a year afterwards.
But those to me are the different ways
that you kind of gear up your launch.
The other thing you wanna do,
and this is really around press, you know,
startups wanna get as much attention and coverage,
is, you then wanna think
about the other newsworthy opportunities in your business.
The other newsworthy, I think, are twofold,
either major announcements or fundraising,
partnerships, fundraising, kind of a company base,
so you kind of have this nice story arc
of a soft launch, we've got a big launch,
and then we've got some really amazing news to share
from all the excitement in our product.
So that's fundraising.
Or, partnerships, maybe you partnered
with IBM, Microsoft, etc.
Business development, whatever it is.
The other one is a human interest story.
There's always a great opportunity
for every company or business to talk about the impact
of their business or their company to the market.
So human interest could be the entrepreneur story.
I call that the origin story.
Or it could be the way people have used
your service, your company, your restaurant, whatever it is,
to achieve an outcome and it's really inspiring.
That's called the customer story.
So either you have something with the business
that's really exciting that could be newsworthy
and that could be kind of the third leg,
or you have something around the story of the product,
either the origin story with the founder involved,
"Here's how I came up with the idea
"and because we've launched
"and now we've had all this exciting coverage,"
or it could be, "Hear how customers are using our product
"and getting a lot of value."
So those are my thoughts on how
to really leverage press to launch a company,
to continue that and get that cycle going,
to get the most out of that.
Anyways, I wanna challenge you
to really stack your business using these approaches,
to really get the most growth as you can.
I hope you found that as useful.
Leave me a comment below
with the best takeaway or idea that you got from this video,
and I'll see you next week.
Have an amazing day.