Should I market my product right after launch?
A Bootstrapper’s Diary
The big question that awaits us all after we – a 2 or 3 member bootstrapped team – have cranked out enough code to launch a web product is “How do we market it?”. A sensible question to ask considering all the effort that has gone into developing it. And the answer that we most often settle on, though considered somewhat trite, is to go for online advertising, press releases, e-mail campaigns and the like to fetch probably the initial hundred users. In-spite of making a headway in this direction, there is a nagging dissatisfaction that we all experience for the reason that these answers can only go thus far…fetching a few hundred users. It is at this point that we are plagued by the inevitable thought: If there are hundreds of them using the platform just a few months from launch, it is only a matter of getting the word out to a million of them and success is all ours to celebrate. Hence, let’s go full hog on the all obvious approach of pumping more resources into mass marketing.
Does this thinking make sense? Intuitively yes. But from personal experience, we have understood that this approach, at this stage, is useless at best and detrimental at worst. Let’s see why.
A few months from launch, most of us are still finding our ground; looking to carve a niche. And the initial traction just indicates a possible need in the market for a product like yours and nothing more. What is pertinent at this stage is to engage with the early users to understand how your product is perceived, how your hypothesis of solving their needs with your product has worked out and what can be done to offer them better value and better experience. This step is extremely crucial for this not only shapes your product but also helps you validate your market. Also, undertaking this step offers the invaluable opportunity to evaluate features based on user needs and stop development efforts in directions that have not been welcomed thus saving precious development time and resource.
Another much overlooked aspect in the user engagement step is how it helps in making evangelists of your early adopters thus setting the ground for Word Of Mouth marketing. Right after launch it is quite possible that you perceive your product to be a bunch of features thrown together to be marketed to millions. However, over the course of your engagement with your users, you will realize that your product is not just about features but an experience in itself that needs to be improved for better adoption and wider consumption.
If you skip this crucial step and spend your time and money on driving mass adoption just months from launch, you will most likely be pumping resources into marketing a half baked product, a solution for a need that is still not validated, a company philosophy that hasn’t fully evolved and a positioning that is fragile. And how does all this prove detrimental? You have cut your existence short by exhausting limited resources. And you have unhappy customers or non-complaining ones at best.
In the process of driving hard the importance of the user engagement step, I do not intend to totally discount the merits of marketing your product in the early stages. But there are definitely a few strategies that go hand in hand with product development that trump other approaches. What they are, how they have helped Muziboo and a comparison of the ROIs on some of these strategies definitely calls for another post!
