You have an idea. You start building a business plan. You start building your product. Should you wait to promote it when at least the beta version is ready or you should prelaunch?
Prelaunch, always. It’s not only trendy, it can bring tons of advantages:
Prelaunch will help you to speed up traffic creation or downloads/usage. Even if you develop a marvellous self-selling product it will still remain extremely expensive and time-dependent to distribute, get visibility, create traffic. All the activities helping you to build traffic and optimize your distribution should be a must.
Prelaunch will help you to create the hype around your product.” A fad. A clever marketing strategy which a product is advertised as the thing everyone must have, to the point where people begin to feel they need to consume it.” - Hype definition by Urban Dictionary.
Prelaunch can help you to build your database: it means your userbase, prospects and customers.
Prelaunch can even help you to monetize BEFORE launching the product. You can activate prelaunch payment for early adopters.Trak.io is a good example: they were able to collect 3.000$ asking for 29$ as early adopter subscription fee. They called it “jump the queue” one-time fee. With this approach they were able not only to start monetizing, but as well to mitigate the risk of lost conversions: people loose interest in a new product quite fast, it’s key to keep it alive. Discounts for early adopters are a no-brainer. It’s a win-win strategy: the user get a discount on the product and the prepayment can partially cover your development or servers cost. You do have as well the chance to start a conversation and a relationship with the ones who could become your first ambassadors and your most loyal customers. Don’t loose the opportunity. Treat them well, listen to their feedback, if possible implement their requests.They will help to test the product, increase distribution and boost your motivation to launch fast keeping high-standards.
Prelaunch can help you understanding the appetite for your product. A bit brave strategy, maybe not advised if you’d like to build a long term credibility, but worth to be mentioned: theOpenFeint bluff. OpenFeint - discontinued at the end of 2012 – was a social gaming network for iOS and Android.They didn’t start launching a beta, neither submitting their idea to Kickstarter looking for funding.They started sending a press release to TechCrunch claiming their product was almost done and ready to be launched. No single line of code was written, at that time. They got TechCrunch coverage. And then, due to the TechCrunch article, a lot of press coverage. Only when they reached what they considered a good number of prebooking and it was clear that several people were interested in the product….OpenFeint team started building the concept. They worked hard for 45 days and then launched. The company was later sold for $104 million.
How to prelaunch? Which are the potential strategies to get an initial interest on your product before having the beta?
Stay tuned 
It will be the topic of my next post.
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