What Not to Do When Launching a Product or Service
Launching your own online business can be the start of a massive success, but starting a business from scratch takes a lot of time, energy, money, and a whole lot of planning. Even with all of the best resources, things can still go wrong and jeopardize your launch.
Luckily for you, entrepreneurs have been making business mistakes for centuries, which allows us to learn from their failures. For example, Elon Musk has had significantly more failures throughout his career than successes, but by learning from his mistakes and not giving up, he’s now worth $36.3B (as of May 2020) and is one of the most influential people in the world.
Without further ado, here are 8 common mistakes to avoid when launching a product or service:
Not Being Fully Committed
First thing’s first, you need to be all in. Launching something that you are not passionate about or fully committed to will be significantly more difficult than launching something you could not be more excited about.
If you want your launch to be a success, you need to be willing to make sacrifices, put in the time and energy, and face challenges head-on as they arise. With all of the difficulties of a business launch, it is easy to get overwhelmed and give up. That’s why it’s important for your why, or your purpose for launching in the first place, to be big enough to outweigh the difficulties.
Does your business idea make you so excited that all you want to do is talk about it? Or does it make you stressed and frustrated and you try to procrastinate everything? The way you feel about your business will directly impact your success, so be sure that it’s something that lights you up!
Not Defining Your Ideal Customer
Selling to someone you know is significantly easier than selling to a stranger. One crucial part of any successful business launch is being incredibly familiar with who your ideal customer is. It's important that you identify who you are trying to reach, where you can find them, and how they will respond to your marketing tactics.
According to Hootsuite, “The more clearly you define your target group, the better you can understand how and where to reach your best prospects. You can start with broad categories like millennials or single dads, but you need to get much more detailed to achieve the best possible conversion rates.”
If you launch your business without defining your ideal customer, you will waste time and resources by marketing towards tons of people who have no need or desire for your product or service. It’s easier to sell to a small, intimate group of people in a conference than it is to shout your message out on the top of a mountain, hoping that someone will hear and be interested.
Undervaluing Your Products or Services
This is one I definitely did when I initially launched my social media and design services. It can be a good strategy in the beginning to offer your services at a discounted rate as you built a customer base, but it can also be detrimental to the long-term success of your business.
If we’re feeling insecure or a lack of confidence in the product or service, we may set the price too low. You need to be charging more than your bare-minimum, so you have money to work with to keep your business not only up and running, but growing. Look for outside opinions on the value of your product. Do some market research and ask members of your target audience what they’d be willing to pay for a product like yours.
You don’t want to regret the price you set after you launch, as it will likely cause feelings of frustration. It’s best to avoid this potential resentment by doing the proper research to get your value right before you launch!
Being Inflexible with Pricing Options
Speaking of pricing your product or service before your launch, you’ll also want to look into offering different pricing options to your audience.
Even after identifying your ideal customer, your target audience will still have differences that are important to keep in mind. Let’s say your ideal customer is english-speaking women between the ages of 24-36 who want to start a business online. These women will still come from different financial situations, or will have different timelines, or will have various differences that are important to take into consideration.
By providing different pricing options to your customers, you will avoid isolating a percentage of your audience who is on more of a budget. You could offer a mini version of your product, a DIY version, or a payment plan.
A one-size-fits-all product or service will likely be a difficult launch. Offering different options or packages for various segments of your audience, you’re more likely to attract multiple segments of your audience.
Not developing a complete launch strategy
You may think that this one goes without saying, but it happens more than you’d think! One thing that can almost guarantee that your online business launch will fail is by not putting a complete launch strategy in place. Don’t try to launch your business without doing the proper research, then taking what you’ve learned and using it to put together a detailed marketing plan and launch strategy.
Maybe you’re so excited to launch your product or service that you just want to get it out there - I get it! But stepping back and taking the time to outline a strategy will produce the best results and save you time, energy, resources, and a whole lot of frustration.
Another step in this process that you don’t want to skip is having a soft-launch or beta test to work out any major bugs or tweaks in your new product! You don’t want to learn that your online course won’t let viewers play the videos after the product has been launched. Check your product or service and then check it again and then it’s launch time, baby!
Are You Ready to Learn Exactly How to Plan & Execute a Profitable, Repeatable Launch?
FREE TRAINING:
How To Plan & Execute Profitable, Repeatable Launches with BossBabe’s 4 Step Formula
Want to create a major cash injection in your business? Register now for BossBabe’s training!
For the first time ever, BossBabe is letting you go behind the scenes of their launch strategy and sharing the intimate details of what goes into launching and re-launching their offers.They’re going to reveal what’s worked and what hasn’t.
In this FREE 75 minute training, BossBabe’s CEO (Natalie Ellis), will share how her team continues to have extremely profitable (and repeatable) launches that don’t overwhelm or exhaust you.
If you want to take the guesswork out of your launches, so you can sign more clients, make more money and sell out your product or service next time you offer it, sign up for this free 75 minute webinar!
You’ll be able to watch the replay afterwards but I’ll be watching live! Join me?!
In this 75-minute training session, you’re going to learn:
➡️How to create a major cash injection into your business through launches
➡️What it looks like to have sold out online launches (put your feet up, pour yourself a ☕ and watch as all the pieces fall into place with ease)
➡️What it takes to launch without anxiety, stress, and overwhelm (yes, really).
➡️How to create your very own launch playbook for sold-out, repeatable, and scalable launches.
I’ll see you there!
XX,
Katie
