Launching a product or business is one of the special moments in the life of every entrepreneur. Optimism and excitement fill the occasion in hopes of a glittering future. But the reality can be far from different. Many entrepreneurs simply fail to follow the basics when it comes to launching their newly designed product/ services or business. Their most common mistake – attempting too many things at the same time, thinking something will hit the target. But this flawed approach only leads to unwanted workload, confusion, and increased expenses.
Following are some of the points that you need to keep in mind as you get ready to take your product to market.
1. Stay Focused On A Sole Aim
Focus is the key word here. Whatever product or service you’re preparing to launch, make sure you don’t take your eyes off it and focus on that alone. Sounds easy right? True. Focusing on one thing isn’t the hardest thing in the world. In fact, the development of MVP involves a similar approach, wherein you zoom in on a given product’s key benefits and learn about its value proposition with the least amount of time and money. MVP also enables you to market the product quickly, collect all the valuable feedback and not waste any time creating things that customers aren’t interested in. This may sound simple, but it is the most powerful strategy to mitigate risk and avoid falling prey to the trap of doing a bunch of things at a time.
2. Don’t Fall In The Perfection Trap
Perfection is a wonderful thing to chase but it proves to be the cause of many product’s demise when pursued without caution. A rule of thumb is – if a product has reached an 85% perfection, it’s good enough to be marketed. In most instances, the amount of effort, time and money that’s spent on achieving the 100% mark simply can’t be justified. So, it’s best that you take your product to the market, see how it performs and then think about achieving absolute perfection. It makes no sense to waste time perfecting a thing that hasn’t yet seen the daylight.
3. Learn from Your Customer Feedback
Once the product is out in the market, it’s the perfect time for you to watch and learn from your customers’ response. It helps to develop feedback loops that allow you to learn everything that can be possibly learned. Pay close attention to the things that your customers like and dislike about your product or service. Understand the absence of features that would further enhance the customer experience. Find out what features work brilliantly and what generates little or no interest. In short, do all you can to engage with your end-user. This could be done in the form of surveys, offering incentives, connecting through social media or even generating outbound calls to gain a better understanding.
The one challenging aspect of this practice is the degree to which an entrepreneur should follow up on the customer response. It’s natural to listen to everything that’s said about a product or service towards which you’ve dedicated ample amount of time, money and efforts. So sit back, take an unbiased view of the feedback and work to make your product even more appealing to the end user.
4. Avoid The Feature Creep
When developing an MVP, you’ll have to contend with the phenomenon known as feature creep. That is the temptation to add in as many features as possible. As you share your idea with your team, business partners and others, you’ll no doubt be offered different kinds of suggestions. Although a lot of those ideas will sound compelling, they can simply be distractions. It’s in your best interests to absolutely stay clear of them. Your focus should be on one thing and one thing alone, getting that to market. As emphasized earlier, staying focused on one thing will allow you to market it quickly and get the customer’s feedback to make necessary changes in the next build. More importantly, if the product/service doesn’t click, you’ll have saved yourself ample amount of trouble, time and money.
Final Thoughts
Throughout the blog, we highlighted the importance of focus and it holds true in any business scenario. Clearly, getting your hands into a number of things that despite your passion and energy are far too difficult to manage at the same time is creating unwanted trouble for yourself. On that note, we can bring this blog to a close. Hope you found all the helpful information you came here in search of. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
