Launching Products: Lessons From Mistakes and Pushing Boundaries

Thinking of launching a product, service or even a company?

Want ideas of what to do and what not to do?

In this special episode, we're going to talk about how to push the boundaries when you launch.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

We're recording literally days prior to Social Media Marketing World 2015. I'm joined by Leslie Samuel, one of our senior managers who I've been working with since the fall.

We're going to explore how to launch products and learn lessons from experience and a lot of mistakes.

You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at what we do at Social Media Examiner to launch a product.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Launching Products
My experience launching

As an entrepreneur for the last 19 years, I'm constantly reinventing myself and launching new products.

In the last five and a half years or so, I have launched the Social Media Success Summit, Social Media Examiner, the Facebook Success Summit, the Small Biz Success Summit, the Content Marketing Success Summit, our now defunct networking clubs, this podcast, Social Media Marketing World, the Social Media Examiner Show, My Kids' Adventures, the Parenting Adventures podcast, my book Launch and more.

Every time we launch something, it’s a completely new experience.

Listen to the show to hear what I learned when I worked at Sharper Image.

Lessons from failed launches

I'll share what happened with My Kids' Adventures. In July 2013 we launched a website designed to help busy parents do fun activities with their kids. I shut it down a year and a couple months later.

I learned when you launch something in a space that you do not have a lot of experience in, you need to do more research than I did.

My research process prior to launching My Kids' Adventures included going to the library and to book stores and identifying popular blogs. While we made assumptions based on what we saw everyone else doing, we didn’t test whether our target audience (busy, working professionals) had the time to read, consume, do and share our content, even though they may have had the desire to do so.

Ways to test these assumptions would have been to go to trade shows attended by my target audience and talk to them or do a joint survey with a big website in that space to gather data.

One thing I learned was sometimes it’s better to go deep in a space where you are already successful than to try to go wide into a space where you don’t know anything.

There are so many niches where people have developed some success. They hear the word pivot and decide to dive into something new. Instead of doing that, the better thing to do is figure out something new that still fits with your existing audience.

The hardest thing in the world is to create an audience. And you can’t launch a product if you do not have an audience.

Listen to the show to learn the biggest mistake I made when I launched My Kids' Adventures.
The Phases of a Product Launch
The research and definition phase

Whenever I get a new idea for a product, it starts with a spark in my brain. One of the first things I do is talk through my idea with people I trust to see whether or not my vision is crazy. I have these crazy ideas about every two months, and the vast majority of them never turn into anything.

After talking to a lot of people, and justifying why I thought this newest venture would be successful for busy marketers, I came up with a list of assumptions to test.

Last fall, I put together a readers’ survey.