

Post Launch Checklist: 10 Tasks You Should Complete - dmor
http://distributionhacks.com/post-startup-launch-checklist

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patio11
There may well be companies in the B2C or social space which would, six weeks
after launch, say "Damn, we missed the opportunity to make a Facebook page on
launch day! Now how can we possibly make our rent?" I would bet against this
being a huge win for many startups/businesses.

If you put a gun to my head and said "Make business value out of a one-time
burst of transient traffic, the overwhelming majority of which won't be
customers" I would

a) Aggressively attempt to capture their email address, for follow-up in a
scalable fashion over the upcoming weeks. The Trough of Sorrow is a very happy
place to be if you have thousands of people who want to talk to you. A
significant portion of the audience for early stage startups hates getting
email. That's not a problem, because 5,000 of them plus $3 will buy you a cup
of coffee.

b) tail -f email_submission_log.txt

c) "Hiya $REPORTER | $INVESTOR | $CEO | $INFLUENCER I just happened to notice
that you signed up for $COMPANY. Let me know if I can do anything for you.
Signed, the CEO. (Psst we have a super secret VIP only tour at $LINK.)"

But that's only if you put a gun to my head. My truest feeling is that there
is an overemphasis placed on launch because of a) community sentiment that it
represents an important milestone, b) we suck _so bad_ at marketing that 1,000
transient users feels like an accomplishment, and c) launch activities feel
like high status (Talk to the press! Be the center of attention!) and standard
day-in-and-day-out-marketing feels low status. (When's the last time an email
campaign generated a celebratory dinner after it for everyone involved?)

P.S. A micro-tip for receiving PR. If one expects PR, one can trivially create
a landing page specific to that source of PR -- e.g. "Welcome TechCrunch
readers..." There's a variety of ways to do this -- if you have a programmer
who can 302 redirect their way out of a paper bag the simplest way is to look
at the referer. You pre-write copy that uses the social proof of whatever the
media source was with the name and logo of the source abstracted out, then
launch those pages in real time as required. You can pitch an exclusive
benefit for people coming from, without loss of generality, TechCrunch --
perhaps a special offer or an exclusive premium created by the founding team
-- as an incentive to that particular audience... and offer it in parallel to
several audiences.

You can arrange this with media in advance with their co-operation but, again,
you don't _need_ people's buy-in to make this happen. It's two hours of work
or less. Your conversion rates will notice the difference.

~~~
dmor
That news story specific landing page idea is gold, I'm going to play with
that soon

~~~
patio11
Glad to have helped.

A variant, less useful for launch (too much to do, not enough time to do it,
PR outlets institutionally less motivated by it): let's say you desire
coverage by, e.g., a particular blogger. You might try to offer the blogger
something. The traditional offer is free or discounted $PRODUCT for them
personally or for their readers. This is often less than motivational, because
a) it can feel like a bribe, b) your $PRODUCT may not solve a problem for the
blogger, and c) the blogger may feel that their writeup of you explicitly
feels like hawking $PRODUCT.

Instead of offering $PRODUCT, get deep enough insight into the blogger or
their audience to identify a problem that is of mutual interest of you, then
create an exclusive incentive about that. The sky's the limit on options, but
if someone on the founding team is an expert about something the blogger's
audience cares about, then something like "A 30 minute video tutorial about
$SUBJECT by $EXPERT" is incredibly motivational. You can use the offer to
create something like that as bait for coverage. Highly motivational, totally
above board, scales impressively. (The pitch writes itself. "We want to create
something of high perceived value exclusive to your readers. Here's an example
of us doing it before. Don't worry, no sales pitch included. Interested?
Spiffy -- we can have it ready next Tuesday or delay launch until is
convenient for your publishing schedule. Can we get a write-up out of this to
introduce this to your readers? It might look something like this...")

You can then prepare a landing page for that coverage knowing it will happen,
and that landing page should probably have an attractive, mutually beneficial
offer leveraging the social proof to the hilt. (I seem to always suggest
"Trade something extra for their email address!" so that would be my go-to
suggestion.)

------
WadeF
In addition I would suggest emailing any peoples blogs you've read over the
past few years.

After our launch, I emailed a bunch of people who I'd never had any connection
with other than reading the content they put out and simply thanked them for
all the lessons I got to learn the easy way because of their writing.

Most ended up promoting our launch in some fashion and a few even became users
even though they'd never heard of us until then.

~~~
dmor
Wow I've never tried that. If I got an email like that from a startup I'd be
so touched, I'm sure you generated a ton of goodwill by doing that.

