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11 Comments

What's your best launch tip?

Hi Friends!

I'm launching my new B2B SaaS in 2 weeks and wanted to know what your best launch tips are? 🚀

What are your tried and tested ways?

Anything you would avoid?

  1. 9

    @zerotousers, @burcs & @RichAwo are right on.

    I am going to assume your question was about building awareness and adding new customers. I jotted down a few thoughts below.

    Get as many email addresses as you can. Try different email capture methods. Set goals of subscribers per week. Try lead magnets, ebooks, email courses, newsletters to capture emails. Bust your butt, creating a community of very happy of customers early on.

    1. Participate in Facebook groups, Reddit, and other niche communities that service your market.

    2. Reverse engineer your competitor's plan with these tools:

    1. Search the Competition: Look at up your competitors in G2 (the other similar services). See what customers are saying about your competitors - the good and bad. Use that to make a better mousetrap. Create content that addresses common issues they bring up and post it in a blog for example.

    2. Create a waitlist with a twist - separate tire-kickers from serious buyers. IF you really want to separate the tire kickers from the serious customers, ask prospects to pay a small fee to jump ahead of the waitlist. Charge something small - $1 for example. You'll quickly find out who really wants the product vs people just kicking the tires.

    3. Be Personal: When you onboard your first customers, handwrite a note, share a personalization video message or email. Use a service like SendSpark to create personalized videos so you stand out.

    4. Use Quora: Figure out what the most questions on quora are related to 'your product category' and address them on your blog:

    Step 1. Use SEMrush, Hrefs, Ubersuggest
    Step 2. Go to “Organic Search” — “Positions”.
    Step 3. Input quora.com into the search field.
    Step 4. Scroll down to “Organic search positions” and add 3 filters:

    a.) Include + Keyword + Containing + YOUR_KEYWORD
    b.) Include + Pos. + Less than + 10
    c.) Include + Volume + Greater than + 100

    Step 5. Hit “Apply”
    Step 6. Scroll down to the keywords.
    Step 7. There you’ll find a list of keywords where Quora is ranked on page #1 of Google.
    Step 8. Open each URL and a valuable answer with a link to your website.
    Step 9. Your answer is instantly on page #1

    1. Give Thanks: Take advantage of the thank you (confirmation page) after someone signs up.
      upsell invite to a webinar, link to most popular blog posts, ask for a social follow, ask for a social share.

    2. Create an ebook/lead magnets by repurposing your best (insert your business category) tips - if you have enough content do it by each custom niche. ie. "25 Productivity Hacks for College Students." Better if the content is evergreen.

    3. Partner up. Find complimentary blogs/newsletters where you can cross-promote

    4. ImPRESS: Subscribe to HARO and respond to reporter's requests. https://www.helpareporter.com/

    5. Add 'click-to-tweet' to each article so readers can easily share your content with their readers.

    6. Guest post on other blogs, find a relevant podcast to get interviewed by.

    7. Add a sign-up URL to your email signature, LI profile, Facebook - anywhere you have a social profile

    Hope that was helpful.

    -Bill
    https://www.FixMyGrowth.com

    1. 1

      Awesome comment, @bflitter! 💪

      Question: For #4 do you have an example of this working? If so, did people actually end up paying the fee? And how did fast-laning the most serious waitlisters benefit the business? Thanks!

      1. 1

        Hey @bflitter just thought I'd follow up. I'd love to get more info so I can write this up (crediting you, of course).

    2. 1

      @bflitter my man this is absolute quality why isn't this upvoted to the stars??

      1. 1

        Appreciate it. I just got on a roll!

  2. 4

    My best launch tip (from reading 500+ founder interviews + doing a few products myself) is:

    Don't start with a launch.

    A huge % of people who had a successful ProductHunt launch mentioned they already had an audience before they "launched".

    The name "launch" gives us a wrong impression that we should start with something, big, go from zero to 43204230 in X weeks, etc. Which is appealing, but things are different in reality.

    Start small.

  3. 1

    I'm actually looking for launch tips too haha @jbsedd

    Published a new product the other but haven't actually launch yet. Keen to hear your advice!

  4. 1

    Commenting to bookmark this thread for later reference.

  5. 1

    Came here to say what @zerotousers said. Had great success launching first on Twitter (with an existing audience), and then launching again a few months later on PH (now with an email list).

    It's not a B2B SaaS though, but my intuition is that it's important to have existing happy customers who'll vouch for your product if you're considering something like launching on Product Hunt.

  6. 1

    Don't do one momentous singular launch, just keep launching, the idea of building press & marketing around one big event doesn't matter if you don't have an audience to follow it. Lot's of small micro-launches will get you a lot farther than the one big event. You'll have a lot more chances for one of them to catch on and be popular too.

  7. 1

    Agree with @zerotousers, if you develop relationships, audiences and even communities before launching, then you're in a much better position.

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