Don't launch | Hacker News Reader

Don't launch

startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com

123 pointspeter12319 comments

This is one of the great advantages of a public beta -- once you've ironed any problems, you can have your media launch and justify it by saying "we're no longer in beta".

Excellent article and blog from a programmer entrepreneur whose been there.

Some other points he makes include -

- Startups should be optimized to learn [product and customer are being discovered]

- Sales metrics are a good thing [start small with $5/day search engine marketing, iterate until this yields results ]

- Bite off small chunks of development [and release them, as they often are a distinct usable feature]

Agreed, Eric writes an excellent blog and is based on real world experience.

Coordinated marketing and product launches make sense in the context of a Product Development model but cut into your ability to learn in the context of a Customer Development model. Instead of allowing your initial customers to teach you about your product, you are skipping that step and going straight to teaching the market about your product.

I've always been a fan of launching early. Until now.

A few months ago, I launched my pet project to the public, with some nice publicity on websites like TechCrunch, but it was incredibly difficult to capitalize on the benefits of launching a premature product.

I thought it was successful. (it was certainly better than not doing a marketing launch at all)... but this didn't take into account the fact that it would have been significantly better if we had launched with good timing and with a better tested product.

I'll know for next time :)

What did you launch?

internshipIN.com

It is incredibly different to capitalize on the benefits of launching a product on Techcrunch, unless you are selling your product to exactly the type of people who read Techcrunch. If your product is Amazon S3, they're great customers to have. If your product solves business problems for bakers, not so much.

The people who benefit most from Techcrunch are the startups where the company is the product, because "We got 100,000 users!" (who don't pay us money) and "We got on Techcrunch!" (who don't care about us) sound impressive when you're trying to sell that sort of product.

But now, at least, you know that your project is something people want. Without launching, you wouldn't know.

He links to SEM on $5/day (http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2008/09/sem-on-fiv...)

In that post, he mentions bidding directly against searches for competitor products. If the competitor has trademarked the terms, is it legal to use them as keywords? I've heard of companies receiving "cease and desist" orders for such behavior.

I've heard of people getting "cease and desist" _letters_ (i.e., from the competitor's lawyer) for this behavior, but never an actual C&D order, which is a court order.

The general approach seems to be, unless the trademark holder specifically complains, you can place ads on their keywords, and even use their trademark in your ad, as long as you're not pretending to be them. "We're better than X", for example. And if the trademark holder does take issue with it, they're at least as likely to take it up with Google as they are to take it to court.

Thanks for the clarification.

I accidentally submitted his front-page instead of the actual article url, which I've since deleted. Thanks for resubmitting peter!

that was the product launch, and this is the media launch then

That is the best blog post I've read this month. Truly helpful.

This advice is great for tempering the more unsophisticated "release early, release often".

Joel makes similar points eloquently in "Good Software Takes Ten Years": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000017.html

Launching enables you to catch your competition by surprise so that they have to play catch up on your features. They also have to go after your customers and your momentum, so there are two aspects of launch: revealing what was once secret, and publicizing that offering as best as possible - which is what a good launch should do -- and then also harnessing feedback.

If one can't execute all those simultaneously, it's better to sit back and watch competition do it instead, and whilst doing this, it may or may not be advantageous to be public.

A soft launch (the product launch in my nomenclature) is also pretty a fairly common/typical technology de-risking exercise.

This post does not take into account that before launching you have no idea whether your project is something people want.

"So don't combine your product launch with a marketing launch. Instead, do your product launch first. Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't marketing launch."

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