The Big Bang Theory of Launching a Product
Many people will tell you the best way to launch a product is to do so early and iterate constantly. I’ve said the same thing, and generally agree with that sentiment. You don’t want to spend a year building a product without any serious customer feedback, without putting your feet to the fire in the wilds of the marketplace.
But one of the downfalls of iterating and releasing constantly is that you lose the opportunity to package a launch into a more full-blown marketing and press campaign. Releasing new features every few weeks doesn’t necessarily allow for the time and energy to be put into marketing and selling those features effectively. That doesn’t mean you should abandon the iterative process and the “release often” mantra, but think about building towards more major releases while doing so:
- Quick product launch to start
- Iterate & release
- Iterate & release
- Iterate & release
- Release Version 2
So while you’re iterating and releasing updates, patches, fixes and new features, think about how you can package all of that and additional things into a new version of your product. This gives you the chance to align marketing, PR and business development initiatives simultaneously.
Standout Jobs launched in late January. Since then we’ve released a bunch of new features, fixed a bunch of issues and overall improved the system. For awhile we were releasing every 2 days to fine tune a bunch of things, and once things “calmed down” we got into a weekly or bi-weekly release schedule. But at the same time, we’ve been working towards “version two” of the product. It’s taking the combined effort of what we’ve done to-date, adding significant new functionality into the mix (based a great deal on customer and marketplace feedback), and giving us the chance to reset the marker for moving forward. In some ways it will be the “going out of Beta” stage for us … which many software companies experience.
With that in mind, I wanted to share a few things we’re learning and preparing as we move towards a new version of our product (and here’s where the “Big Bang Theory” comes in, although it’s hardly a theory, more a string of ideas mashed together…)
