Dan Martell - January 12, 2015


How To Launch Your Startup


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

208.15344

Word count

1,125

Sentence count

53


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we talk about the importance of a soft launch and how to leverage the news value of your product or service to get the attention of the media and investors that you need to get in order to get your product/service to market.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.520 Launching your startup, probably one of the most important things to get right so that
00:00:05.720 you can get as much momentum, as much people to show up to actually use your product or
00:00:10.280 service.
00:00:11.280 You know, I've been doing companies now for 15 years and one of the things that I've
00:00:15.200 really tried to figure out is how do you launch and what does a launch mean?
00:00:19.720 Some people think that a launch is going crazy open and public about your idea and making
00:00:24.400 sure that you get covered by the New York Times and your local radio station and the
00:00:28.400 TV and all these different places, but to me I feel a launch is actually broken down
00:00:32.820 into three parts.
00:00:33.900 The key really is about leveraging the newsworthiness of launching your company or being new, and
00:00:40.520 that's why it's called news, so that you can get as much press and attention and people
00:00:45.500 talking about you to get people to show up to your door.
00:00:49.080 So the key though at first is to do a soft launch.
00:00:52.080 When you're building your company, you don't know if what you're selling, your product,
00:00:55.820 restaurant, whatever it is, you don't even know if it's good yet. So the last thing you want to do
00:01:00.380 is do this crazy blown out launch and get everybody to show up when you can't even get your stuff
00:01:05.660 delivered on time. You can't even fulfill the promise that you made on your website. So a soft
00:01:11.920 launch, you see this happen all the time in retail environments, online, within tech companies,
00:01:17.420 where they'll build a list of people that have shown interest, eaten 100% through word of mouth.
00:01:22.560 Maybe a restaurant opened up, but they're not really officially open. They're doing their grand opening later
00:01:27.740 That's an opportunity for you to take those people and kind of move them through a process of
00:01:33.160 Understanding how the experience went getting that feedback tweaking and that is what I call a soft launch in as a technology company
00:01:40.700 That's what we do. We get people to subscribe to our list
00:01:43.940 We invite five a day and those five people sign up use the product give us feedback
00:01:49.180 And by going through that process over a two to three month period, that's how you start
00:01:53.560 to refine what's called the onboarding experience or the first time user experience.
00:01:59.280 So soft launches is perfect for that.
00:02:01.340 Do you get press for that?
00:02:02.740 You can get some people tweeting.
00:02:04.260 You can get people writing blog posts about it.
00:02:06.080 You can get early adopters kind of sharing it on Facebook.
00:02:09.460 But no, you don't really want to get press.
00:02:11.360 And because you're not letting people sign up directly, then it doesn't, it's not from
00:02:15.560 a news point of view, it's not considered press.
00:02:17.500 So that's a perfect opportunity to kind of get people giving you feedback on the product,
00:02:21.940 but it's not news yet because you haven't opened it up to the world.
00:02:25.560 It's also a really good strategy if you're thinking of raising money at some point
00:02:28.460 to get investors interested.
00:02:31.580 You know, I'm going to say this quickly.
00:02:32.940 I don't want to go off on a tangent, but there's two times to raise money.
00:02:35.480 There's before you actually launch the product and after the product's launching,
00:02:38.520 it's working really well.
00:02:39.720 And any other time in the middle there, it's really tough.
00:02:42.180 So, you know, using that soft launch and that opportunity to learn
00:02:45.640 as well as really perfect what is gonna then be
00:02:48.480 what I call the big launch.
00:02:49.740 And that big launch could be six months to a year
00:02:52.700 after you've actually started the company.
00:02:55.120 And some people that are in the lean startup
00:02:56.900 or the launch early and often space
00:02:58.660 are being like, oh, that's too long.
00:03:00.320 I totally disagree.
00:03:01.860 I think that you could be in that iterative process
00:03:05.080 of taking people that have shown interest early
00:03:06.980 and walking them through and getting that feedback
00:03:08.820 and kind of continuing through that cycle
00:03:11.020 for six months, a year, no problem.
00:03:13.360 So that when you finally do launch,
00:03:14.900 When you open up your doors and you get all the press,
00:03:17.900 you get the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal,
00:03:19.740 all these people, the TV news station,
00:03:22.200 Oprah's calling to have you on her show,
00:03:25.680 the product rocks.
00:03:27.440 And that is the big launch.
00:03:29.480 And that could be, again, six months to a year afterwards.
00:03:32.120 But those to me are the different ways
00:03:34.220 that you kind of gear up your launch.
00:03:35.780 And then the other thing you want to do,
00:03:37.260 this is really around press.
00:03:39.460 You know, startups want to get as much attention
00:03:41.920 and coverage, is you then want to think about
00:03:44.760 the other newsworthy opportunities in your business.
00:03:47.420 And the other newsworthy, I think, are twofold.
00:03:50.060 Either major announcements or fundraising,
00:03:52.480 partnerships, fundraising, kind of like company-based.
00:03:55.180 So you kind of have this nice story arc of
00:03:57.140 I have a soft launch, we've got a big launch,
00:03:59.100 and then we've got some really amazing news to share
00:04:01.040 from all the excitement in our products.
00:04:03.060 So that's fundraising or partnerships.
00:04:05.260 Maybe you partnered with IBM, Microsoft, et cetera,
00:04:08.380 business development, whatever it is.
00:04:11.240 The other one is a human interest story.
00:04:13.900 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, right?
00:04:21.880 So human interest could be the entrepreneur's story.
00:04:24.960 I call that the origin story.
00:04:26.520 Or it could be the way people have used your service, your company, your restaurant, whatever it is, to achieve an outcome.
00:04:33.420 And it's really inspiring.
00:04:35.120 And that's called the customer story.
00:04:37.140 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.
00:04:42.720 or you have something around the story of the product,
00:04:46.740 either the origin story with the founder involved
00:04:49.140 and here's how I came up with the idea
00:04:50.380 and because we've launched and now we've had all this exciting coverage
00:04:53.760 or it could be, you know, here are how customers are using our product
00:04:57.160 and getting a lot of value.
00:04:58.640 So those are my thoughts on how to really leverage press
00:05:02.920 to launch a company, to continue that and get that cycle going
00:05:06.820 to get the most out of that.
00:05:08.840 Anyways, I want to challenge you to really stack your business
00:05:12.340 using these approaches to really get the most growth as you can.
00:05:16.440 I hope you found that as useful.
00:05:17.960 Leave me a comment below with the best takeaway or idea that you got from this video.
00:05:22.240 And I'll see you next week.
00:05:23.260 Have an amazing day.