The Launch Business

There are a bunch of approaches to avoid when launching a new project. You don’t want to be silent, you don’t want to be insecure, you certainly don’t want to beg.

Your people, if you’ve made your thing for them, will be hoping you tell them when it’s ready. The masses, from whom you might find some of your people, will want to hear about something cool and new. So you’ll get a minimum amount of good will when you press publish.

But if we look at your launch through the lens that people want to make progress, you can change your launch into something more. You can turn a minimum amount of attention into helping people with something they want.

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People carry latent desires. They want to be seen. They want to be associated with people of status. They want their ideas to be protected and spread. They want to be inspired. They want to help people they care about. They want to get better at their skills. They want to be a model for others. They want to find like-minded people. They want to be heard. They want to save on expenses. They want to impress their life partners. They want to get closer to quality. They want progress in their careers.

These are all low-level, persistent drivers of behaviour. Not everyone will move on all of these struggles all the time, but some are ready for some movement on one of those fronts, today.

And so you can plan your launches to be less about your product, and more about helping your audience.

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Instead of repeating an announcement, how about highlighting someone else’s work? “Check out the work of my pal. Their new online course just came out and it’s really good.” You’ll put your product among a list of other high quality products your audience might want to bundle together.

Instead of relying on a single announcement, how about you announce that you’ll make an announcement soon, and what you’ll do in the meantime to help your people? “At the end of the month, I’ll be launching something brand new. Until then, I’ll be showing how to work with this methodology.”

Instead of extracting favours from your feed, how about making your whole feed answer a specific struggle, maybe by sharply delivering on inspiration, insight, fun, news, or learning. “I publish a blog for developers who want to get better at the soft skills that are actually hard.”

Instead of rushing to hit send, how about modelling how people in those struggles might find your announcement to help them get progress? Predicting that “when they’re craving an example of a product that nails the basic, they’ll surely look at my new thing and say ‘this is so neat’”, and then removing non-essential features from the landing page.

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So build into your launches a whole new dimension of service. Because everyone just wants to make progress.