When starting a new business or product, getting things off the ground quickly and efficiently determines success. While building a software product, you do it through a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that provides your users with a set of core features that solves their immediate problem. The MVP helps you get feedback from your users to address their problem better. This article reveals how to launch a successful MVP.
Once your MVP is ready, it’s time to take it to the market. How exactly do you do it? How do you get started to receive feedback? Where should you promote your product? Who should be your initial set of users?
Let’s discuss these questions in detail in this blog article.
Different Types of Product Launches
Hard launch
When you have a big budget for your launch, you could opt for a hard launch. Hard launches are generally reserved for large companies with big reputations. Essentially what you get with a hard launch is a huge marketing push that overwhelms your initial users and your target demographic. This push could be focused on reaching and converting a large number of new users.
However, for an MVP, we recommend what is known as a soft launch.
Soft launch
In a soft launch, you do things the same way you would for a traditional launch, except that you focus more on marketing and less on marketing reach. What we mean by that is that, instead of aiming to spray & hope to reach a lot of people, you intentionally focus on converting your target users one by one. You also adjust your marketing and messaging as you move along.
For example, you can offer free versions of your product for users who could spread the word. If you want to charge users eventually, we always recommend you to have a pricing model right from the beginning. The MVP also helps you test and fine tune the pricing.
Blogs
You could use content marketing to build an audience slowly, especially if you’re trying to establish a passionate community around your business. This will not happen overnight, but it’s an essential part of any startup or business. Ideally, you will start blogging to explain your value proposition from various perspectives long before launching your product. You want to build an audience that will eventually want to buy your product, thus signaling that you are valuable because of your content.
Secure backlinks
You can also get backlinks from other websites that will add to your SEO. Your brand’s credibility is crucial when it comes to search engine rankings. When you finally start selling your product, this will help you rank higher.
Consider digital PR
You could also hire a digital PR company to promote your upcoming product. This company will create some buzz and awareness of your brand, which will offer you some valuable publicity before the product is even released.
These are just a few ideas for soft-launching your product and building traction before the launch.
Factors of a Perfect MVP Launch
There are a few factors that can make or break your startup. Of course, the things that will make an excellent success also depend on a lot of other aspects.
A scaled-down marketing approach
As we discussed earlier, your number one priority is to establish the value of your offering to a tiny slice of your audience. You would want to clarify your value proposition to a small number of people who can give you unbiased feedback.
You could do this by sending out emails, sending messages on social media sites, someone could tell their friends about it, or eventually, you can offer it up for free.
Remember this aphorism: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.” Take your time and make sure to get the details and steps right. Don’t rush the process; each step will take time, and you don’t want to rush it because you will probably make mistakes along the way.
Limiting your reach to a few target users will help you course-correct early on, which will make the process of effectively scaling easier later on. It will also help you avoid being overwhelmed by product requests once you have a larger user base.
A benefit-oriented pitch
Use a benefit-oriented pitch that addresses the deepest, acutest pain point of your audience. It’s a bit difficult to describe aptly, but it is essential to selling your users the benefits of using your product. You would have already created a value proposition for your product, so now you can talk about how it will solve users’ pain points.
One easy trap many startups fall into is, instead of selling the benefits, they tend to sell the underlying technology – the secret sauce that makes it all happen. That approach can lead to your product being placed far away from their wants and needs if your customers don’t make the connection.
A benefit-oriented pitch is a smart way to identify the opportunities and the reasons why people would buy your product. You can then use that information to launch your product into the market.
The most effective way to do this is by creating an explainer video that explains what your product does, why it’s useful, and how it will help solve problems.
The Metrics
Your launch plan should include metrics that help you understand your audience’s behavior. It’s critical to collect information about how people are using your product.
Tools like Google Analytics make it easy to see how users interact with your site and offer you a wealth of data about your audience and customer behavior. You can set goals, track conversion rates, and see what people are interested in on your website.
Specifically, you would want to measure the following:
Traffic: This is the number of visits to your website or app downloads each day. Ideally, you would want to be receiving a steady number of visitors on a consistent basis.
Registrations: You also need to measure the number of users who actually create an account on your website or app to start using it.
The number of active users: This is the number of active users who are still using your product.
Retention rate: This is the percentage of people who keep using your product after some period of time. You want this number to be very high or at least higher than 50%.
Paying users: Finally, you want to measure the number of people who are willing to pay for your product.
In conclusion, we would like to say that launching an MVP has its own challenges, but if done correctly, will help you position your product better than ever before. And possibly get you more customers within a shorter amount of time.
In the end, all you need to do is get your product in front of people and get them to try it. Then listen. Adapting quickly is a real key to success.