5. Launch!
A traditional product launch involves building anticipation for your launch day through marketing and PR, going live on the big day, then doing a media and marketing blitz to try and acquire a lot of users quickly while your product is buzzing.
We don’t recommend trying this as a new entrepreneur. These blitz campaigns aren’t very effective if you are new to the startup scene. We recommend a soft launch with no media or marketing blitz. You should go live with your product and just move into your first marketing campaign.
Pre-launch
Prior to going live, you should review the Growth phase of the launchpad and determine the initial set of growth hacks, or marketing strategies, you will implement after launching.
You can find product launch checklists online if it will make you more comfortable that you haven’t forgotten anything.
Launch day
How to go live for a website:
- Remove the robots.txt if you have one so search engines can crawl and index your site
- Remove the coming soon page if you have one setup
- If you’re using WordPress, click the checkbox in settings to encourage search engines to crawl your site
How to go live for a mobile app:
For publishing in the app stores, you will want to first research how to do App Store Optimization (ASO). The app stores are like search engines, and you need to optimize your app listing so it can rank toward the top of the search results.
You may want to hire a freelancer to help you plan and write your product listing for ASO. You can find people on Fiverr for this.
Publish your app in the app store(s)
- If you aren’t feeling confident in doing this yourself, you can try asking the developer(s) who built your product to hand hold you through the process by doing a screen share while you or they submit your app to the app store.
- Publishing apps on the app store typically take 2-3 days for approval.
Click done when you have launched your product!