Sometimes just learning a new word can completely change the way you operate your business. Just one little word can have that much power. In this article that word is “Market Launch.”
The next time my investors ask me when we’re going to launch I will have two answers for them. One will be our “product launch” and the next will be our “market launch.”
This clarity is going to make my life so much easier.
First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.
Anyway, some of my big takeaways:
“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”
“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.”
“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”
“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”
For obvious reasons (i.e. Pocket Tales is a social reading game) this link is extremely valuable to me.
The biggest choice you’ll make in looking at this list is what gambits not to implement. Focus is key, especially if your application isn’t a game, so decide what behaviors or outcomes are the biggest priority, and design your “game” elements around those.
This presentation explains how to use Survey.io to measure product/market fit. You will get more out of it if you visit the source of this presentation at Venture Hacks and take a look at the sample survey. You should also consider reading the transcript or listening to the audio that goes along with this presentation.
The Lean Startup methodology does not advocate using optimization techniques to make startup decisions. That’s right. You don’t have to listen to customers, you don’t have to split-test, and you are free to ignore any data you want. This isn’t kindergarten. You don’t get a gold star for listening to what customers say. You only get a gold star for achieving results.
What should you do instead? The general pattern is: have a strong vision, test that vision against reality, and then decide whether to pivot or persevere.
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Eric Ries Go read the full article ”Learning is Better than Optimization” because the idea that we don’t have to use optimization techniques to make startup decisions is heresy in a lot of circles and this quote just doesn’t capture the whole article. |
Mint continues to serve up great real-world examples of how to successful start and operate a new company. Here are a couple gems to demonstrate why you should read this article:
“The Product. Maybe we didn’t have a high viral coefficient but we had a great net promoter score…The delight after a quick setup, and having all those graphs and balances was palpable and emotional.”
“Blog / Original Content. Noah talks about the pre-launch days here but quite simply we focused on building out a unique personal finance blog…Eventually the blog became #1 in personal finance, and drove traffic to the app.”
If our first press release at Pocket Tales has taught me anything it’s that the press:
Okay, that’s not entirely fair. I only have two data points to speak of and they’re both online publications. No offense to my fellow bloggers, but your average print publication does a lot more fact checking than your average blog.
Our first press release was announcing our participation in the 2010 SXSW Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition (we finished as a top 3 finalist if you were wondering.) I’ll admit the only reason we bothered to write a press release is because we knew we would very likely have our story picked up by Inside Indiana Business and if you follow IIB then you know for the majority of their stories they just publish the press release.
Except, IIB wrote a short introductory paragraph to our press release with a few mistakes. Here’s what they wrote:
Two former Orr Indiana Entrepreneurial Fellowship winners have been asked to pitch their new online reading video game at the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator Competition, next week in Texas. The developers of Pocket Tales say the game helps children develop critical reading skills.
Here’s what’s wrong:
The second news outlet that picked up our story was a casual blog called Tech Cocktail. In their story they misrepresented our launch date and misspelled my name multiple times.
We’re grateful for the coverage and if anyone from Inside Indiana Business or TechCocktail is reading this I hope you don’t blacklist stories about Pocket Tales, but it was an important lesson for me to learn about working with the press - no matter what facts you provide them, they still might make their own assumptions and get your story wrong.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the MAN who is actually IN THE ARENA, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
-Theodore Roosevelt, CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC, “The Man in the Arena”
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