
Ask HN: Is there a “product launch as a service” company? - newyearnewyou
For example, I think I have a good product, but I want to hire some help to get it launched, acquire initial customers, and hopefully build momentum. This would include social media, promos, press, etc.
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anandkulkarni
Lots of digital agencies do this for you, but splashy agency launches aren't
usually how startups get off the ground (with a few exceptions). They're how
bigger companies release new products because they have ample brand awareness
and budget.

The conventional wisdom in the last ten years for new startup products are
that you should open discussions with initial customers yourself.

This kind of early customer development lets you prove your hypotheses around
the product having demand before investing in expensive promotional spending.

~~~
tchock23
I'm torn on whether this 'conventional wisdom' is any good. Founders are the
most biased when it comes to customer discovery interviews.

I have listened in on quite a few customer discovery conversations where
founders took the lead and been amazed at what they think they heard. Small
signs of enthusiasm turn into 'they loved it!' while negative comments are
often ignored (classic confirmation bias).

However, outsourcing it to a digital agency and waiting for a report is bad
for different reasons (expensive, likelihood to ignore the findings, hindsight
bias, etc.)

As an advisor to quite a few local startups, I still haven't found what the
'right' approach is...

~~~
anandkulkarni
I recommend founders end customer discovery interviews by asking for a
purchase (or a preorder/letter of intent, depending on the situation). This is
the most immediate way to testing whether a customer's really willing to pay.

~~~
agorabeta
i completely agree! when we were asking discovery questions, people tend to
want to talk about the pain point and that gives you an illusion of
validation. as soon as we ask, so how much would you pay for this? the
conversation shifts and the true priorities come out.

~~~
tchock23
Take any answer to a question phrased as "would you do XYZ" as essentially
worthless.

It's all reported behavior and can/will differ vastly from actual behavior -
especially in regards to willingness to pay.

Instead focus on behaviors they are already exhibiting (e.g., what are you
buying now in this space/category, and why?).

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kumarski
There's quite a few but it depends on your product. I've done over 30+ product
launches and gained about 25M users in total as an outside consultant working
with companies to help them do launches.

The questions that always help me suggest the best tools are as follows:

* Have money to spend or not?

* B2C or B2B

* Age Segment targetting

* Trigger Frequency of potential customer

* # of players in the space

* Have you been through 4 product iterations or are you trying to have a big splash without a designated purpose?

* Do you have your own email list?

If you can answer some of these questions, I can recommend the best tools and
if you have any questions about tooling/analytics, I can point you in the
right direction and tell you where I've failed in product launches as well.

~~~
pouta
Not OP. But my startup is pre-launch and I have answers to those questions.
Where can I send them?

~~~
kumarski
email me or comment here.

~~~
kumarski
kumar(at) engineersf (dot) com

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free2rhyme214
There are, however, I think people worry too much about launching. It helps
for a short period of time, but then people move on to tomorrow's product hunt
submissions.

What's more important is nailing a distribution strategy. Focusing and
executing on distribution is difference between Airbnb and everyone else.

Source - [https://growthhackers.com/growth-
studies/airbnb](https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb)

------
akanet
Customer acquisition should absolutely only be done by the founder in the
beginning. This is the most important part of your fledgling business and one
you cannot afford to outsource.

~~~
Gustomaximus
Really? That would be like saying coding, accounting, HR, Marketing, Sales etc
should only be done by the founder at the beginning. This is not realistic for
anyone but the smallest business and could falter some attempts to create a
business by the founder trying do everything them self.

Getting assistance can be good/bad based on quality of said assistance. I
can't see an absolute rule here about the founder being hands on or not.

~~~
nostrademons
Coding & sales should also absolutely be done by the founding team at the
beginning. The other functions can be outsourced.

The reason is because of the feedback loop between sales, product, and coding.
You learn very important lessons in the early stages of a startup about who
your customers are, what they care about, and what is technically possible to
deliver. You're at a huge advantage if you can turn those lessons into product
features within the hour rather than within the 2-week iteration.

------
lani0
[http://www.theonion.com/article/apple-unveils-new-product-
un...](http://www.theonion.com/article/apple-unveils-new-product-unveiling-
product-2162)

------
vbrendel
Not generally a good idea, but please post a link to the product to get more
specific feedback. A product is not a business yet. Before you sink money into
a launch you'd want to go from "I think I have a good product" to "I know I
have a good product" (some people refer to this as product-market fit).

------
Gyonka
I run a company that among other things, works with mid to early stage
startups (as in, some folks with an idea). We help them build the product
(design, development), launch it and do marketing. My email is in my profile
if you have any questions, etc.

I recommend nailing down exactly what you think an MVP should look like and
iterating on early customer feedback.

It's important to stress that we are there to help startups augment their
teams at later stages, but by no means can we replace the culture and passion
of a dedicated team working night and day to make your dreams come true. We
can build you something fantastic, help you grow a user base, but at the end
of the day the road to most effective profitability and vision is in the hands
of the founder.

------
Huhty
We just launched our SaaS service for bloggers last week (after 9 long months
of work). After seeking an answer to this question myself in the past, I think
I've learned enough to partially answer this question.

Here's a few takeaways:

1\. Definitely prepare for launch DURING development, and ideally start on day
1 (or ASAP). Set up a pre-launch page and explain your upcoming product.
Collect as many emails as you can. This gives you ample time to ensure that
you don't launch to crickets when the big day comes.

2\. If you are not famous or well known, it will be 10-100x harder to gain
traction, but not impossible. Luck also plays a bigger part if you are unknown
and/or have little to no connections.

3\. No one will understand your product/service better than you. You need to
outline all the benefits your service provides via blogging, landing page,
explainer video, etc. We hired a video creation company to create our
explainer video, but ended up re-writing the script ourselves and basically
produced the whole video (other than the graphics, music, and voiceover).

4\. You can hire a PR company, but they are very limited on what they can do
especially if working with a limited budget. In this case you still need to
give them interesting things to write about, since like I stated above, no one
will understand your product/service and its benefits better than you. PR
results OBVIOUSLY can be hit or miss and don't guarantee any results.

5\. Long-term growth is usually a fairly standard procedure, and most
successful companies follow a similar common formula. Have a blog and
regularly post blog posts that would interest your potential market. In our
case it's bloggers, so our blog will contains posts that bloggers find
interesting. Blog content also drastically improves SEO. You can use your
arsenal of blog posts and share them when the time is right/relevant (on
Quora, Reddit, HN, Linkedin, etc). Over time, organic word-of-mouth growth
kicks in (along with compound growth), but until then, you have to do things
yourself. Remember: a bunch of little wins = Success. Finding these little
wins is hard and time consuming and no one will likely do it for you,
especially in the beginning.

To answer your question, I think there's just too many moving parts to
outsource all of it to a "growth/traction company" but doing it yourself is
very possible as long as you put legitimate time and effort into it.

If you're curious about what service we launched, it's at
[http://blogenhancement.com](http://blogenhancement.com)

~~~
joshmn
Just checked out what you made, looks neat. Kind of an aside: Please don't ask
users to send their password over plain-text in 2017. That's terrifying.

~~~
jordz
Also, it would be good if it used https by default, the sign-up link on the
latest version of chrome registers as insecure due to "This page includes a
password or credit card input over HTTP. A warning has been added the URL
bar.".

------
chrisjh
Reach out to Benjamin Bryant
([https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhbryant](https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhbryant)).
He was behind Pebble’s launch campaigns on Kickstarter
([http://kck.st/2nFRA4a](http://kck.st/2nFRA4a)).

------
Cynosure
My company does this (although I never thought to refer to it as a "PLaaS"
company). While most services out there focus on promotion, launch plan, sales
automation, advertising, etc. I find those activities to be mostly about
execution. Most startups struggle much sooner than that, with strategy. They
struggle in the planning and validation of the product idea and the business
model itself. Basically, they shortcut this stuff (often because they love
their idea and are already convinced the world wants it). Then they find out
after launch how real the real world can be. In reality, there is a ton of
work to do way before any of the tactical "go to market" stuff can happen. You
have to have an impeccably clear understanding of your value prop, your
audience, and your sustainable differentiation. After all, if you don't have a
sustainably unique idea that clearly adds value to a well defined audience,
you don't need to launch or market your idea. Instead, you need to go back to
the drawing board and identify your core value creation more clearly. Also,
you need to have a well vetted, living business plan that does more than
simply document your intentions. For new business/product/service ideas, we
use a proprietary business planning system that focuses on risk management,
among other things. As part of the process, we help entrepreneurs understand
their customers really well. From there we can build the business around
delivering value to them. Any respectable entrepreneur should be busting their
a$$ day and night to get their business going, but that doesn't mean they have
to do it all themselves. It simply means they have to find a way to get it all
done and they have to understand it all. No business gets off the ground by
one person working in a silo. So I have respectfully disagree with he comments
that the founder must do this work. I strongly believe that founders, just
like everyone else, have certain strengths and weakness and the most
successful ones find a way to get help in areas where they are not so strong.

------
pryelluw
I do that. Shoot me an email. Ill try and answer any questions you may have.
No bs or strings.

------
tyre
Products are things that help people accomplish something. Without initial
customers, how do you know you've built something that people need?

Have you tested it with users? If so, and they haven't paid you money for it,
why not?

It's not a good product if no one uses it.

------
rsweeney21
You're basically asking if you can outsource your startup. I'm sure you've
heard that in startups, the idea is worthless, it's all about execution.
Execution is mostly what you just called "product launch." It's figuring out
how to cost-effectively acquire and retain your customers, assuming you got
product/market fit right on the first attempt. (hint: you didn't)

I'm sure there are agencies that would gladly take your money to do the things
you listed, but they won't produce a working business model.

Rather than thinking of it as the product launch, you should think of it as
your first experiment to test product/market fit.

------
Kaizyn
There is one problem with this service offering (and it isn't insurmountable).
Put yourself in the position of a founder who just spent the last 12-18+
months building your startup. Would you then be willing to hand over the
reigns to someone else or to some firm to do the launching for you? Especially
when the launch is pretty much the one and only chance the company has to get
off the ground? Outsourcing really only makes sense when you can transfer the
risk in a way that mitigates it. Here it feels like you would be increasing
risk of failure if for no other reason that the launch firm has less to lose
if you fail than you would.

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kyo3
I've tried starting something like this a couple of times, but want to do it
full time someday. I would focus on the web building side of things, but would
need someone with more charisma to do the promotional side. Regardless, I
haven't really sunk the time needed or capital, which doesn't really hold well
when trying to start a company :P Maybe some day.

------
ozaark
As far as branding goes, tailorbrands[1] does an excellent job at getting a
professional image setup. As others have mentioned there are still large areas
that could use help with business dynamics and goals.

[1] [https://www.tailorbrands.com](https://www.tailorbrands.com) (Not
affiliated, just impressed with their offering)

------
jramos
Gigster offers ad-hoc engineering teams that can help you launch, promote and
scale. Some of their engineers are employed at social media companies and
would undoubtedly prove useful for what you're trying to do.
[https://gigs.to/r/zdBxq5F](https://gigs.to/r/zdBxq5F)

------
peteforde
[http://www.smartfoundations.ca/](http://www.smartfoundations.ca/)

------
maxbrodi
We do that with my agence Mozza (mozza.io) but it doesn't work if you do
nothing in the meantime. You can deleguate a part of your work and get
guidance, but ultimately you can't replace the effort you and your team will
put in building the right product by understand your users.

------
Animats
That's what PR agencies do. It's not cheap, but it's certainly available.

~~~
Gustomaximus
PR is a small piece of the pie. I would personally not recommend a PR agency
to lead a launch.

~~~
prawn
A PR company is likely to have suitable strategies and contacts to launch to a
local market. I'm not sure they'd be the best bet if you were launching a
typical SAAS product to a general global market. For a local launch, a lot of
it is teeing up publicity and knowledge of the contacts and what they want is
critical. For something global, so much of the work is content production that
you may be better off trying to do it yourself.

~~~
rhizome
I think of PR as having a fundamentally reactive posture, even when they're
ahead of the messaging. Marketing, where there are many freelancers and
consultants, would be a much better spend towards creating a strategic
approach.

------
novaurora
[http://producthunt.com](http://producthunt.com) is how a lot of startups do
it nowadays, and reporters are usually in there looking—so if it's interesting
it may also get pickup.

------
oliwarner
You've described a marketing agency.

Whether or not a startup can justify the expense is really between you and
your investors because it will likely be a very significant outlay. There's a
reason most people DIY as much as they can.

~~~
arisAlexis
I think OP means a more modern HNish way of launching online to Product Hunt
kind of sites. Marketing agencies are a bit stuck in the past

~~~
oliwarner
I sometimes question the startup herd mentality. "Why would I go to a company
who have been managing product launches —amongst every other aspect of
marketing— for decades, when I could find a small garage outfit that wants to
do everything with NFC?"

Sometimes established industries aren't always bad. Nor does their age mean
they're only doing what they did on day one. These companies only survive if
their clients survive. Age denotes success.

------
jbhatab
I'd say [http://www.growthgeeks.com/](http://www.growthgeeks.com/) is my
favorite source for this. They have lots of different people that can help you
out.

------
Shipasreenayak
If it is a B2C product launch, you have Retail as a Service : Airflash, which
gives you access to Early Customers,Bloggers,Connects to Wholesale
Distributors and Retail Access through popup stores

www.airflash.co

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spking
I've heard [https://startuplister.com/](https://startuplister.com/) is pretty
good bang for the buck.

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phozy1
sounds like you should do your research. All depends on what EXACTLY you want
and how much your willing to spend... If someone did that theyd want money for
it.

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discordance
[https://www.bluechilli.com](https://www.bluechilli.com)

------
EGreg
There is this:

[http://launchrock.com](http://launchrock.com)

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slater
I think pretty much every "social media" (ugh) company will do that for you

~~~
newyearnewyou
Yes, but the approach for launch vs. general promotion would be much
different. Also, if there was a company with any type of portfolio it would be
best.

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nnn1234
Lest the HN bots think I am over selling my startup,

Check out www.crowdraising.co

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kr0
I believe this is called an event planner?

~~~
ci5er
? How so? I thought "event planners", planned shows and conferences, not
product launches.

