How I launch my ideas
As I work on the 12 startups in 12 months challenge, a few people have asked me about my process in launching these ideas. So here it is:
- Find an Idea
- Competitor and Market Analysis
- Idea Validation
- Plan Out Your MVP
- Build That MVP
- Launch It!
- Review and Iterate
If you're interested in learning more, I dive a little bit deeper into each of these steps on my blog:
https://justindra.com/blog/2022-11-30-launch-process/
Do you guys have a process that you follow? Curious if you follow a similar approach or something else.
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Great read Justin, thanks for sharing!
During the competitor and market analysis do you also focus on the previous campaigns and strategies they adopted to learn from and use during your project launch?
Also may I know about the previous projects you worked on?
Thanks for reading!
I don't really delve into the campaigns, as I'm not too sure how I could find that out. If you have some tips here, I'd appreciate it. But I definitely look at their strategy in the sense that I can see if they have a lot of blog posts or articles, they're probably doing SEO and whether or not they have fb ads or google ads when I search for their relevant things.
All my projects in the 12 startups challenge are listed here: https://justindra.com/tags/12-startups/
Hey Justin, nice blog. Thanks for sharing!
The blog template is free and open source at: https://github.com/ixartz/Astro-boilerplate
PS: I'm the author
Thanks @ixartz! I'm loving this template. It's so easy to extend from compared to others I've used.
Thank you for reading it! Hope it was useful.
Great blog. Thanks for sharing.
what other ideas do you have for people about a month out from launching? any tips or great ideas as I am in this current stage.
Hi @joshfreeland, I personally have just been using this framework even post-launch. But instead of doing it for the whole idea, you would use it for one of your features. So if you have a feature you want to build, you can do some research on if that feature could be useful or not, check your competitors to see if they offer the same things, and then validate it with your current users or potential users. And then plan out the MVP for that feature, build it and deploy that.
Otherwise, there's obviously the marketing side and I haven't nailed down a single process yet, I've found that it very much depends on the project. But I'd say just choose a marketing channel and focus on that instead of doing multitudes of different channels immediately.
Hope that helps!
Hi Justin, could you elaborate more on a "launch it"? Is it a product launch, or it goes with some campaign? Also, do you have any formula for validation and how to reach early adopters? I work on similar things and would love to hear about your experience.
Hi @DVNL, for me, product launch basically means if someone wants to use it, they need to be able to go somewhere and then sign up. This could be a landing page, a gumroad page, a form that they fill, etc.
That's step 1 of launch, and then I'll post it up on a few channels and send it to people that I've spoken to previously about it from the market research and validation phases. I generally post it:
I haven't done a producthunt launch yet or any marketing campaigns attached to it. Mostly because doing these each month, I haven't been able to fit it in.
Validation/early-adopters-wise, I've been lucky in that I already knew myself and some friends or friends of friends for each idea that I could talk to them about it. But otherwise, definitely relevant subreddits and FB groups are full of people that are really helpful, I haven't gone to twitter yet, but I hear it's also pretty great there.
I have found that since the ideas I've launched so far are in completely different industries or niches, I need to find new people each time. So I have been thinking about focusing on a particular industry and trying to keep my ideas in that area. So at least I don't have to spend time looking for these groups and people again.
Hope that ramble made sense :)