Photo Courtesy Of Anirudh Koul

Every client who comes through our doors with a new service asks our opinion about how they should launch it. Everyone wants attention for the project they have been working hard on, and everyone disagrees over precisely how they should get it. Most of these opinions fit into two main groups.

The first group believes that exclusivity is the secret to building buzz. They are usually thinking about the highly successful, invite-only, launch of Gmail, where people were paying more than $50 on eBay to buy an invite code for the free service. The problem with this example is pretty obvious: there is only one Google. The Gmail launch has been imitiated ad nauseum by startups, but nobody else is finding their invite codes sold on eBay. Google had 300 million devoted users when they launched Gmail and they were the #1 brand in the world. It takes a lot of hubris to think that people will treat your launch the same way. Customer excitement is not something you should ever take for granted, and for every person who is intrigued by the super-secretive launch there will be 10 who couldn’t get in and will never come back.

The second group believes that they should do a big, flashy, website launch. They talk about PR campaigns, news coverage, and even a physical party. These people want to bring in Jon Bon Jovi and have fountains of champagne to get attention for their launch. This approach has an obvious problem too. An efficient development team launches early and improves the product based on customer feedback and bug reports. If you are throwing a big launch party as soon as your website goes up, there is a good chance you will find yourself embarrassed by the end of the night. If you are launching a site that doesn’t have flaws, rough patches, missing features, and bugs: you are launching it too late. Many people who will be attracted to your launch will find one of these problems and never come back. And no, sticking on a tag that says ‘Beta’ will not help.

There is a sane solution, and it is the one we practice with our clients and internal products. We just put the website up. No invite codes, no secret passwords, no big parties. The odds are, your new site is not going to be flooded with traffic (no matter how great it is). We then talk to a few hundred of our friends, family members, advisors, and possibly Twitter followers and encourage them to start using the site actively. These are people we know: they are far more likely to provide useful feedback and far less likely to take offence over a bug or missing feature. Over the next few weeks we collect this data and improve the site.

Once the most obvious flaws and missing features are addressed, and people are happily using the service, then it is time to start doing PR and getting attention…but that is the subject of another post.