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What To Know Before You Get Started Making Money Online
Starting a company is hard. Especially when you are starting from nothing. I grew up on a farm in Iowa.
When I got started I didn’t have a brand, or an audience, or any customers to fall back on. I had to start it all from scratch.
One skillset I wish I knew when I got started was how to run a successful product launch.
I honestly think this is one of the most important skills to learn for being an entrepreneur. If you can master it, you’re golden.
What’s great about product launches is that when they get off the ground properly they can instantly take away the need to be constantly hustling.It can break you into your market in a big way. Instead of hunting down people, they’re coming to you. Which is a hell of a lot more fun in business. If you are ready for a launch, here’s what I look for when determining if a product or company is ready.
Do You Have A Killer Product?
If the product that you’re putting out into the marketplace isn’t top-notch then no amount of glossing up with fancy marketing is going to save it. In fact, if you launch too soon, it can kill the business. This happens on Kickstarter over and over. People launch. Then they don’t deliver. And they piss off their core customers, who should be their raving fans.If you can’t honestly say that your product has the potential to be the number one solution in your market then you need to go back and focus on the results you’re delivering to customers.
How Are Your Systems?
If you don’t have your backend systems and processes set up correctly what ends up happening is that things go haywire and you spend a huge amount of time and energy dealing with problems in your supply chain.
A great question to ask is… How many customers can you handle until your business breaks?
One big challenge with launches is being too successful. I did this in my early twenties on accident. Our first $1M+ product launch brought in 300+ customers.
But there were only 3 of us to handle all the onboarding… and since it was a new business, we hadn’t built any onboarding systems yet!
It was a total mess and left us burnt out and exhausted.
Don’t do that.
You want to be focusing on solving your customer’s problems, not dealing with all the new ones you’ve created by mistake. The best way to circumvent this chaos is to test your systems on a smaller scale prior to launch.
Positioning That Sets You Up To Win
If you know you have a product that’s truly unique and is going to help a ton of people, the next question is “How do you get this into the hands of your customers?” You can accomplish this with your positioning in the market.
This may sound like a basic concept but I see so many first-timers speeding by this step without putting in the work. What happens here is that your product ends up being like everybody else’s and it never actually takes off.
It gets lost into the sea of sameness.
Take the time to master your positioning because if you can get this right it actually takes care of a lot of the other work in business.
Action Steps
- Do an analysis of your top competitors and ask yourself if your product is truly better. If yes, move forward with your launch, if not, focus on delivering better results to clients.
- Test out all your backend systems, operations, logistics, customer service, etc. If they aren’t prepared to handle a move towards scale reassess them one by one.
- Do an analysis of your top 5-10 competitors and decide what makes your product unique, what edge do you have on them. Position your product in the market so that it can’t be mistaken for anyone else’s. If you look like everybody else, start over.
Result You Will Achieve
You’re ready for your product launch and what to fix if you’re not quite there yet.
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.