A Few Thoughts on Launching

Yesterday, I made a very low-key soft launch of The Bootstrapper Guild—my new business project—to a small list of highly interested people. I thought for a long time about letting in as many people as possible, but ultimately decided against it.

Right now, there are 50 adventuresome entrepreneurs going through the program for the very first time and helping me build up the community.

I was planning to offer any spots still available right here today, but they were all snapped up in less than 2 hours. Sorry about that; I honestly wasn’t expecting that big of a response for such a low-key event. Next time, we’ll open it up to everyone.

Launching is a very special thing. You should launch in some form or another every day, but the big opportunities don’t arrive so often.

I’ve launched a number of things now right here from Riskology.co, and I can say without a doubt there’s something new to learn with each one. You never truly perfect this process.

If you have something to launch yourself, there are a few things you’d do well to know about in advance and think about carefully as the big day comes.

Sometimes you just don’t know until you know.

I’d love to say I knew all along that the first round of Bootstrapper Guild memberships would sell out in 2 hours—I’d certainly look like more of a “guru”—but it isn’t true.

I tried to position the service in a way that would speak deeply to the people it’s a good fit for, and I used a few strategies that I thought would make it very appealing, but the truth is that you can’t always predict this kind of thing. Reality is often different from your expectations, and sometimes you’ll find yourself very surprised by the response you get for something.

This could be good or bad. I’ve been fortunate that the products and services I’ve launched have been successful for me and the people who use them so far, but I know that I’m not immune to failure. I’ve written articles here on Riskology.co that I thought would instantly go viral but ended up falling flat, never to recover.

Don’t let the success or failure of your launch depend only on your expectations because your expectations will often be misguided.

Something will always go wrong. Always.

So far, I’m batting exactly 0% on perfect launches for this lifetime. I don’t know anyone else who’s doing any better. You try your best to engineer big flaws out, but something will always come up, and occasionally little things you didn’t think about will become “big deals.”

For instance, I had no idea that so many international folks were interested in my project when it went live. As it turns out, my payment system wasn’t set up to accept credit cards from overseas.

Should I have thought of that? Probably, but I didn’t. If there’s anything you can’t test enough, it’s your payment system. Go through it as many times as you can handle without going insane, and recruit your friends to test it, too. You’ll be glad you did because they will find problems.

And on the subject of testing, try your damndest to breaking everything. This is less of an issue if you’re launching something stable like an e-book, but this was my first experience launching something with many moving pieces. If you’re launching a service on the web or even a physical product, there are a lot of moving pieces that can break. This is where beta testers come in very handy. I use them for everything I launch whether it’s a business project or completely free.

Soft launch whenever possible.

Everyone makes a big deal about the big launch day, but I worry much more now about soft launching—getting the “real thing” in front of a small group of enthusiastic “real people.” Soft launching is like the official test. Something always goes wrong, and it’s better for it to go wrong in front of a few people than a lot.

And the soft launch is a true idea validator. No plan, regardless how deliberate, survives first contact with the customer. When you get your thing in front of the people who actually use it, you’re going to find them using it differently than you anticipated.

This is the perfect opportunity to not only fix broken things and make sub-par things better, it’s also the perfect opportunity to give your real customers a chance to take ownership of what they paid for and get exactly what they want out of it.

I love soft launching because it’s a controlled environment where I can test all my assumptions. When the full launch comes around, there’s little left to worry about—hang up your shingle and show the world the awesome thing you created.

People are more important than numbers.

At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is how you treat people. If all you see in your launch is dollars made or units moved or numbers increased, then you’re an asshole. Sorry, that’s just my opinion.

When you create something and launch it to the world, look at it for what it really is—an opportunity to help people with something they need and make their life a little better. Of course you want to do that for as many people as possible, but realize that every dollar that comes in came out of the pocket of a living, breathing, hardworking person who is putting their trust in you.

If you’re creating something and you want people to give you their time, money, or anything else for it, you have a responsibility to make it awesome. If you have limited time to work with, focus on awesome ahead of optimization. Awesome leads to more money and more of everything else anyway.

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With any big project, there are a million things you can focus on, but only a few that are really important. Best to focus on those. Treat people right, test the hell out of everything, and don’t let your expectations get in the way of a great experience. Good luck with your launch, whatever it is.

And if you want more help with concepts like this, consider checking out The Bootstrapper Guild when we launch it in full not too long from now.