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Launching a new idea can be a thrilling, terrifying time backed by a huge amount of adrenaline and hype. But it's also a time with a lot of pitfalls that people fall into that end up costing them dearly. We're here to help you avoid these with a data-driven plan that derisks the process of launching your new idea.
- Don't quit your job. Start in your weekends and evenings, and when you have evidence that people might be willing to join your vision (sales or volunteer signups), drop down to 4 days a week at work. Contracting, fractional roles or other flexible jobs can be convenient for this phase, but stable part-time or nearly-full-time employment is the best option.
- Start with 50 interviews and surveys with potential customers / members to understand what problem are you're trying to solve: Who are they? How painful is the problem for them? How do they currently solve it? Are they willing to pay to have it fixed? Would they volunteer to fix it?
- Build a Landing page website. If there are strong indications that customers will pay or volunteer to have the problem solved, build a landing page for the idea with a list of features and a waitlist. Include a premium offering they can pay or volunteer for.
- Promote to your existing followers and network.
- Create several different video ads designed to engage different demographic audiences.
- Run a social media campaign aimed at several audiences that might be interested in the offering. Send them to the landing page.
- Monitor your Social media performance: which audiences are most interested in the product? Which ones commit? Increase ads budget for these audiences. Grow what's working, kill what doesn't.
- Define go-ahead. How many sales or signups do you need to feel that this will be successful? What number will suggest that this idea can be financially sustainable?
- Website build. Once you achieve go-ahead, build a basic MVP of your product - the most basic possible version of a website or an app. An MVP is simple and ugly, but provides more value to the customer than your landing page. Try to think about one key feature that your customer would be interested in, that's different from what they can find elsewhere. Minimize risk by handling most of the process work (like adding people to a mailing list) manually - this reduces the cost of the build. Include a premium feature to confirm that users will pay money or volunteer to solve the problem.
- Analytics and SEO / GEO set up. Install and configure Google Analytics and the Meta Pixel properly in your website so you're understanding as much as you can about your customers from day 1. Set up your website SEO / GEO / AIO for success.
- Advanced social media campaign. Ramp up ads to audiences that have shown interest. Monitor results, learn what's working and tweak ads to increase useful traffic to the site.
- Define success as a certain number of sales or signups in a set period of time.
- Pivot solution. If success is not achieved, go back to your customer interviews, learn more about the problem, and change your approach to solving it for people. Be prepared to learn that your idea isn't the right one, and try something different.
- Advanced website development. If success is achieved, invest more in expanding the features of the MVP to do more processes automatically (delivering efficiency for you) and to provide more points of difference for the paying customer (delivering user delight).
- If you have a flexible employer, keep dropping your work days as your income increases. Once you've got enough income to replace your salary, quit your job.
Launchbot can help you with this automatically. Try for free now.
