Extreme Product Launches

Crickets.

Imagine that’s what you hear as you jump up and down on the biggest physical or virtual stage you can afford on Launch Day.

It’s probably the worst possible outcome for a product launch. You and your team have slaved away for months. You put finishing touches on the product, the marketing, and even splurging on an extra super-duper haircut for you.

Yet, you hear no response. The prospects who you thought would be clamoring…aren’t.

Once you dig into it, it turns out that they were just politely telling you what you wanted to hear. Except you’ve already spent months or years worth of your life polishing your product idea. It turned out to be a turd.

To make it worse, you could have just talked to the audience before building anything. You could have found this out at the beginning. At least you could have been building something people wanted. Something they’d be excited to buy. To pay for.

Presenting…the extreme product launch.

In software development, Extreme Programming (XP) is a style of programming. XP promotes coding with courage. Developers can make changes to large chunks of code, because they have tests to prove a change is ok. Before writing code, they write tests. Those tests make sure the code works as expected, regardless of how the code ends up looking.

It’s a special technique called test driven development. How about applying the same system building approach to building a business system?

Extreme product launches take the same idea and applying to a fledgling business. The main goal of a business is to make money. Before you start building up a technology or information business, try to sell your product first. If you prove you can generate cash flow, you have much greater certainty that your business will work. You don’t really need a product to prove that.

Even though an extreme product launch may sound like a new idea, it isn’t. There are many sites which promote selling a product before you have it. Kickstarter for products. LeanPub for books. Enroll.io for courses. Thanks to the take-down of private company funding regulations in the US, there’s even websites for funding businesses which don’t exist yet.

In order to be able to sell up front, you need to figure out:

• Who to sell to.
• What problems they have.
• What they’re going to pay.
• What objections they might have, and your plans for overcoming them.

You don’t need a product to do that.

In fact, at this early stage, you DON’T want to be writing code. If you don’t know what your prospects want, you’re just gold plating a bunch of unproven assumptions into your product. Which has a good chance of turning out to be useless. To your intended audience.

And it doesn’t take much. Just talk to them. They don’t bite.

If you want any help, schedule a call with me. I don’t bite either.