Get ready, set, launch

Week 24: Your launch task list, delivered.

Ok, for those of you keeping track of what’s been happening with the business, I have some updates.

We’re approaching a pretty critical period in our industry where we kinda need to launch. Although it feels like nothing is ever as ready as it needs to be by that point in time, it’s just going to have to be good enough to GO.

So, over the past couple week’s I’ve been tying up loose ends across all areas: product, partnerships, and all other things. And I’m now working towards setting an official launch date.

Yes, it feels scary, because it all kind of feels uncertain. But, I have two takes on this.

We’ve all heard the advice launch before you’re ready. Channeling that advice gives you two outcomes.

1. It adds pressure to push harder on everything in order to meet the deadline. Remember procrastinating on an essay submission and not being able to convince yourself to sit down until the day before, which resulted in pulling an all-nighter to get it done? No? Ok, well, that was me. And you know what it works, that added pressure of a tight deadline does put things into high gear.
   

2. Timing is everything. Things only succeed when they’re executed at the right time, and by that I mostly mean the social and economic climate. If you miss the window to do something, you can miss the opportunity entirely. Especially in tech, building fast and launching quickly matters more than launching with the perfect product, because it’s going to change anyway once users start interacting with it and giving you feedback.
   
   For us, launching at the optimal time of year, when fashion rental is a top priority for our future customers, is absolutely more important than launching with a perfect product.

So, I’ve decided I need to set a launch date in the next few weeks. And with that, I’ve been working through a task list of things we’ve done, that might be useful for you to consider before going live too.

Pre-launch Success Task List

Set yourself a launch date. That’s the whole first step. Put it somewhere other people can see it. Accountability and crunch time all bundled in.

A launch date doesn’t have to be paired with a launch event. Strip it back. You can always host something a couple of months later, once everything is live, functioning optimally and running.

If there’s a bottleneck that feels out of your control, find a way around it. Don’t let not having gotten a reply from someone, or a partner onboarded yet, be the reason you don’t launch. You can’t wait on other people, and you especially CANNOT let them delay your progress just because they don’t check their emails often enough.

Triple down on personal brand. I could cover this topic in an entire separate post, BUT: if you’ve (and you should have) already been showing up publicly as a founder on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or Substack, or all of the above, now is the time to do the most. Make more content and use those channels as a funnel into your business, to build traction, grow your audience and turn the people watching you build, into the people who download on day one.

Get press. Getting people talking about what you’re doing, from every angle, is a recipe for success. The more noise being made before you launch, and as you launch, the harder you hit. A few ways to do this: create a press kit and reach out to publications in your hometown to feature what you’re building. That’s light credibility, and once published, it becomes greater credibility when bigger publications come looking. Get on podcasts and public profiles and talk about what you’re doing. It won’t land with everyone, but it will land with some, and some is all you need to start the snowball effect.

Hire interns. You DON’T need to do it all yourself. Even if you have a co-founder, or two, you can still bring in resources to get you in a better position for launch. Interns, especially those at university or college, are looking to specialise in certain areas of your business and get real hands-on experience, and working for you is a great way to do it. How do you find them? Reach out to the schools directly and their departments will post on the student jobs boards for you. You can also use the social channels you’ve been building your personal brand on and share a post. You never know who’s been quietly following your build.

Full disclaimer, none of this is meant to make the feeling of uncertainty go away. I still don’t feel ready, and I’m not sure there’s a version where I do. But remember, that’s part of the whole program of entrepreneurship, and what you experience every time you put something new out (at least to a degree).

The date is the thing now, and everything else has to organise itself around it. That’s the real function of a launch date: it’s a decision that you’re going to anyway.

Ask me in a few weeks how it went.

xx KP

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