Launch & Make Money
It's the moment you've been waiting for. You are ready to launch your app and start making money. Unfortunately, your job is far from over. While you can always go and research your market some more or tweak your app, you only get one shot for launch. If you don't strategize the launch steps perfectly, it could mean the death of your app within a few days.A launch is like a symphony - where all moving parts have to be perfectly timed and coordinated. Once you start playing, there is no restart button. While each product launch is slightly different, there are still a few fundamental principles and steps that need to take place to attract and keep the highest number of customers.
Test Your Product With Friends
Once you are 100% certain that your app is fully aligned with your customer profiles from Discover Your Market, it's time to test the application with a few test users. Psychologically, it's difficult to be so close to launch and then feel like there is a possibility that you may have to start from scratch or even make a few small changes and delay launch. But you have to take your emotions out of it and prepare yourself for the possibility.
Identify between five and twenty friends or close acquaintances that represent your target customers and who will also give you an honest opinion about your application. Talk to them individually and explain to them what your application is meant to do in fifteen seconds or less - an elevator pitch. Then say nothing more and show them the application and let them use it for a few days.
Leave incentives out of it, unless it's part of your launch strategy. Resist the urge to answer any questions and try to simulate the true customer experience. Gather your feedback, go back and make changes, give yourself a week to contemplate the changes and begin strategizing your launch.
Identify Your Early Adopters
There are a group of individuals in your target market who are different than the others. They are the people that tend to experiment more with new ideas, concepts and products. They are the ones who tend to create trends. They are the customers who make products or videos go viral. Identify who those people are and where they tend to learn about innovative trends. But be careful. Because if you don't give this group of people what they want and need, it could mean the end of your product.
Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising
Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising are an important strategy to employ during the launch of a new product. But it is secondary to an impactful strategy to access your early adopters. The power of Marketing and Advertising are no longer what they used to be. Your target customers no longer have trouble accessing information of interest. It's the opposite. They struggle with knowing which source of information to trust. Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising needs to be executed tastefully, strategically and with a taste of humor and wit.