How Do You Amplify Your Launches?
We are about to launch a big new feature for our product in a couple of weeks. About 4 weeks ago, I started producing a lot of content so that we could create a presence on various social channels. Dribbble is important in our community, so I started a baseline of posts for Dribbble, and the re-shared and hit those up on places like LinkedIn, Instagram, FB, and Twitter.
I also wrote a few blog posts about higher-level ideas related do animation and design production that I have been sharing via our site and Medium (a publication picked up one of the articles).
Finally, I've been prepping a product hunt page / launch and am in the midst of a relatively simple homepage redesign.
That said...
It feels like I'm missing something critical. Like there isn't any buzz yet on channels, or that maybe people don't know yet about our upcoming release.
If you have a min to share your thoughts, I'd love to know:
What do you do to amplify your launches?
Am I doing everything you'd do?
Am I doing too much?
Is there something else I should be doing?
Relevant Facebook groups can bring good amount of traffic and exposure.
You're definitely in the right direction.
For me, I'm always in launch mode.
Even though I started a new project 1.5 months ago, I still talk about "how I build" every few days to capture people's attention.
I often throwback some of the major statistics and tell people how I got there. Here's an example.
Hi Travis,
I'm in the middle of a very similar situation as you. I am currently prepping for the launch of Newny (v2 - https://newny.io). I thought to myself how could I generate a decent amount of 'buzz' or interest (from the relevant target audience). I don't know if there is a method (if you don't already have an audience - like most really successful indiemakers have).
But for me, as someone without a serious audience of potential customers. I started cold emailing. I source them from relevant locations (Eventbrite, Twitter hashtags, linkedin groups, linkedin search, IH etc). Then I would email them to say 'Hey I am working on this thing that would help your organisation...' then encourage them to sign up to my waiting list. I have even gone the extra mile of creating personal loom video for each of them. This has helped me slowly (extremely slowly but surely) build up a decent sized waiting list of highly targeted potential customers.
I am planning on offering them a significant early adopters discount to help me generate future leads/sales.
I don't know if you find this useful but this is the prep work I am currently in the middle of. My goal is to get to 300 - 500 highly targeted leads in my waiting list before I launch in December (just before Christmas).
Of course, I am also writing blogs and social posts but those are just to remain visible and active. Unfortunately, in the early days there just isn’t a way to do it by just organically posting on socials. I can't avoid the grit that goes into a successful launch. building a waiting list can become very handy for your PH launch too.
Hard work but the pay off will be so damn sweet!
FYI, I am still verifying this method but I thought to myself that I have to go all in and leave no option alone haha. Take what I said above with a grain of salt !
If you have other ideas/ advice for me. I'd love to hear it.
@mooraage Really interesting. I haven't started with cold emailing, but it's been on my to-do list for a while now, and tbh I was thinking of starting it up next week. So, the timing of your advice is uncanny.
It sounds to me from where you're at that your direction is correct. Build the initial list, etc. In our very very early days we had a terrible MVP and used that as a mechanism to increase our "list" of interested people. On top of that, we offered a "pay-what-you want" model which was unique at the time for a product like ours.
I've been asking a lot of people... and many have said that carefully curated cold-calling seems to be a good approach at this stage. One person said they were doing this by signing up to a bunch of forums and groups, paying attention to who asked questions, then doing a cold outreach.
I think it's a grind.
It's definitely a grind with these things but it's a necessary evil.
I'd love to know a little more about your 'pay what you want' approach. Is your product based on a subscription model and so people chose 'what they wanted' to pay every month for your product?
Sounds really interesting.