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 .

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.