Launch Quickly: Lessons From Fastpreneurs

When we rebranded from being a direct-to-client agency to a service provider to agencies and entrepreneurs in the linkbuilding and outreach space we took around 14 months.

It was a huge success, and I — mistakenly, I now believe — put that down to the huge preparation we put in.

• We took time perfecting our landing pages, advertising and marketing messages ready for the switch.
• I hand-coded an entire customer management and workflow management back end for the team.
• We spent months signing up for and analyzing the marketing and pricing strategy of dozens of competitors (and still got our initial pricing wrong — we set it way too low to start out).

Our Fast Launches Followed

Following on from that success (albeit with some mistakes on pricing) we could have been forgiven for pursuing further launches at a snail’s pace, however I was inspired by a couple of Entrepreneurs who seemed to be pushing things out at breakneck speed.

I’ll share their content shortly — and it’s pretty inspirational. I’ll also share some tips on bringing out and testing minimum viable products quickly from our experience doing so.

I don’t think we’ll ever willingly miss out on 14 months of potential revenue to get everything absolutely perfect on day 1, when so much technology exists to let us bring things out immediately and iterate from there.

And more importantly, the change in tack led to us launching two new services and start testing on a third and fourth in the space of 3 months this year.

We didn’t have all the nuts and bolts perfect, we didn’t spend months analyzing every competitor. We just took a ‘feel’ of the potential customers in the market, and launched. At the flick of a switch we added 40% to the size of our business.

Russell Brunsen — 3 Funnels in 24 Hours

The video above is Russell’s best for a long time. His team take on three challenging funnels, for entrepreneurs, including all the supporting marketing copy and video within 24 hours and get them live.

This is something he regularly sees his ClickFunnels customers take months to put together. You’ll learn a lot about prioritizing work and leveraging experts at individual pieces of the puzzle to get things done without agonizing over every little detail.

It wasn’t this video — it’s too recent! — that inspired us all those months ago, though. It was some of the regular episodes he hosts on Funnel Hacker TV where customers have asked him to ‘fix their landing page funnel etc’ and he does so in a timed episode. Seeing products launched and marketing copy and content put together so quickly and ‘ready to test the market’ inspired us to do the same.

Prototyping new ideas and seeing if people will buy/what people want is now a core part of our growth strategy. The number of times you test something and find that previously dead leads are excited by a new twist on your offering and are actually willing to pay more for it was a big shock to us and has been a huge encouragement to us to continue to innovate and test.

We have tended to build things manually (usually bootstrap and Django based automation and landing pages) but as an experiment our next project will launch entirely on a ClickFunnels hosted domain, taking inspiration from Russell and trying to build everything as quickly as possible and get to market in the space of a month.

Gary Vaynerchuk — Take Action And Learn The Lessons

This excellent answer from the Ask Garyvee Show was one of my first inspirations to change my thinking on the perfection vs speed spectrum.

Taking action is always better than pondering if it’s going to work — Gary Vaynerchuk

Gary rightly points out that by iterating quickly, and learning from mistakes, and tests, you can move your business forward and learn important lessons about the market much more quickly than analyzing and thinking about what might work.

We’ve definitely benefited from that on our last two launches when we got unexpected customer feedback about our premium offerings and one of our biggest orders ever days after launch on one of our new tests.

One of the things I like most about Gary’s content is he always brings things back to ‘the market’. The quickest way to find out what the market really thinks is to find out where the dollars go as quickly as you can.

Some Quick Tips

• Take advantage of software tools like ClickFunnels which allow rapid deployment of landing pages and marketing funnels (other tools are available, we just selected CF for our projects after a lot of testing — it has most of the features we need).
• Decide on one ‘core’ feature of your products that need to be developed/coded to get customers on board and testing. Make the the core of all our initial efforts — don’t get distracted trying to make the ‘whole final masterpiece’ before you go to the table and ask customers to buy.
• Everything you do could be done ‘better’. But when sales are being lost that cost is lost forever. Having a 90% version up for 14 months while you perfect will almost always make you more money than making nothing for 14 months while you perfect.

I’d love to hear from other entrepreneurs about your lessons in ‘fastpreneurship’ and quick launces in the comments! Let me know what you’ve been up to!