Transcription
Hey, I have a question for you. Have you spent months working on that new product? You've invested thousands of dollars into prototyping, and you've now maybe put down a deposit with the manufacturer for your first few hundred or thousand units. Well, what happens if you go through all this and your launch has failed? You've set up your storefront, and you're not getting the traction you hope to get. Well, in this video today, I'm going to walk through five strategies you can use to fix a failed launch and how to come back from that with your product. [Music]
Hey guys, I'm Kirsten with Launch and Scale. If you are new to this channel, we focus on actionable strategies to help you launch new products successfully and scale your brand profitably so that you can live life on your terms by being an entrepreneur business owner. So if that resonates with you and you're excited for new content, be sure to hit subscribe, and let's go.
Alright, so my assumption, if you're watching this video, is that you've just had one of the worst days of your life where you've launched your product after two years of work and you don't get the traction you want, and you feel like a complete failure. Or you're someone that really wants to avoid that feeling. I've been there. My very first product launch ever was a complete failure. We were so excited, spent months of work to get this thing going, only to take a product to crowdfunding and raise literally a third of what we needed to. But then, using the five strategies that I'm going to talk about in this video to diagnose why your product launch failed and how to fix it, you're going to see how we were able to come back from a $17,000 failure to a product that sold over five hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars in its first month. So let's dig into the strategies. If you're someone who has had a product launch fail or you would like to avoid a failure, please write yes or no in the comments to let me know who you are.
Okay, so the first thing to know before we get into how to fix it is we have to know how to diagnose the issue. So what exactly is the thing that caused your product launch to fail? In my opinion, there are three things that cause product launches to fail. Number one: your product doesn't isn't wanted by the market. Okay. Number two: your product is wanted by the market, but your product messaging was off, as in when you went to sell it to your demographic, either you're selling to the wrong audience, or the messaging that you went to market with is just not resonating enough to get someone to take action and buy your product. Number three: lack of awareness. So lack of awareness can mean that you have not done any pre-marketing; you've not told anybody but your mom that you're launching this product, and then when you launch, you're getting no traction because no one knows about you. Or lack of awareness means that you simply don't know how to get awareness; you don't know how to build your audience, etc. So we'll diagnose one of those three things. And the big mistake I see people making with product launches is assuming right away that the market doesn't want their product, and this is the most dangerous assumption to make because how do you know that you don't know? Um, there are other variables that can cause product launches to fail. That was exactly the mistake that we almost made with that first product launch of mine where we thought, wow, because we raised only $17,000, clearly it was a product that the market didn't want, right? So what got us to go back and try again, and what did we change? For us, we had a messaging problem. So after we went to, we said, you know what, maybe it isn't the product; let's confirm our assumptions by going out and talking to the market, and it turned out that the way we presented the product or the messaging and the audience we were going after was completely wrong, and that's the very thing that caused people to not purchase the product. So for us, we realized it was a messaging problem, and we went back, changed our messaging, and then relaunched, and that's where we hit um success with that. So um messaging can make a big difference, and you don't want to make the mistake of assuming that your product isn't wanted by the market.
Okay, so let's talk about each of these three things, and what are some five strategies you can use to diagnose and come back from each of these. Okay, so if your launch has failed or you have a storefront up and you're getting people to come to your website but nobody's buying, this is point number one where you have to first test whether it's your product that's the problem. The one way to avoid your product being the problem with this is to, before you launch, to validate your product. You want to make sure that you can have people actually pre-order or buy your product in advance to prove that the market—there is demand in the market. Okay, validating your product comes to point number two, which is your message didn't resonate. So if you've already launched and you've already done the hard work to get the product to market, um, it's a little too late to validate your product, but what you can do is dig into the messaging behind your product to see if maybe there's a different market, a different way that it can resonate that you can get people to um identify with your product as a solution that they want to like to have to a problem. So my point number two is that if your message didn't resonate, here's what you can do to test and come back from that. It is so common for beginner entrepreneurs online that have no marketing experience to not know who their demographic is, who their target audience—who is actually going to buy their product or what messaging will actually resonate. So a way to improve that is to get into the head of your customer. You want to go out and start to talk to people in the assumed target market to validate and make sure that they actually want your product and that the reason for them using your product is strong enough to get them to take action. Number two: you might be talking about the wrong thing. So products are designed to solve a solution in somebody's life. So if you're going to market with a—we'll say a guitar amplifier, because I love bringing a jam stack into this—an electric guitar amplifier, if I said, hey, there's this box that you can put on the bottom of your guitar that is battery powered and and you can do cool effects with it, and it's $300, guitar players will be like, why do I need that? I have my whole setup over here. It doesn't land. But if the very thing that we we switch to what we're selling is that, hey, you know that equipment you have, are you tired of not being able to play electric guitar wherever you want because the setup is it just takes too long, there's too many wires, and it's just, you know, the setup you have right now isn't portable? What if, for this lit this solution for only three hundred dollars, you can put a guitar amplifier on the base of your guitar that'll let allow you to get set up within 30 seconds and play anywhere? That is what made JamStack a multi-million dollar company. So know what you are selling; know that maybe you are getting too feature and benefit oriented, and you have to really look at what is the end result that your product solves in somebody's life. Okay, more basic solution is why do you take Advil or Tylenol for a headache, right? So when you have a headache, the consumer thinks, I need Tylenol, I need Advil, I need something, I'd be profit, I need something to cure that. So but if I were to try and sell Advil as like, hey, do you want a pill? No. So be sure you're not making that same mistake with your audience. You want to really get to the root of what is the very result or problem that your product is solving that would cause somebody to take action and buy your product.
Okay, so point number two in that is that go out and talk to your audience; make sure that you are have the right target audience that you're going after. Number two: make sure that you're focused on validating what the result is or the pain point that you're solving in their life and communicating that effectively. Okay, and number three, um, is you should absolutely spend a little bit of money on Facebook to use it for a data tool to test different headlines, different copy, different angles. You can do this for a few hundred dollars if you're like, you really want to test different angles in different messaging.
Okay, so we've talked about um number one that big causes a big issue is that your product isn't what the market wanted. You can look to solve that by digging into the assumption that maybe your messaging is off, and how you can solve your messaging is by going out and digging into your target market and get to know them a lot better and making sure that you're presenting the product in a way, but also understanding that sometimes it takes a while to find the right messaging that is going to click with your audience. Okay, point number three is show how your product is going to deliver on that promise. So in the last point, we talked about how not communicating your product in terms of the result it brings in somebody's life and just getting too lost in features like battery power stuff and a few other just commoditized features that don't really differentiate your product, focusing on the result; the next thing you need to do is back that up with getting people to understand simply how your product does that. Okay, so with JamStack, we don't just want to say, hey, this this box on the bottom of your guitar gets lets you play anywhere; it's like, okay, but how does that work for me as a customer? Like maybe they aren't understanding how to use your product yet, so you want to walk through simply how to use it; what feature is it that allows you to do it? So in the form of JamStack, they were able to create a video, which now you can shoot this on your iPhone or um Google phone or whatnot, of showing how the product works with video um backing up that, oh, JamStack is a quick assemble solution that allows you to play anywhere anytime in 30 seconds. Okay, well, show a video of someone installing it and playing in 30 seconds. Okay, when you can get someone to click immediately with what your product does in terms of how you get them the result with your system, that is when it's going to click for somebody because you know very um very simply that if somebody isn't resonating with your message, perhaps your message is too complicated. We run into this all the time with engineers and scientists that are looking to launch products; they're used to writing scientific papers and not marketing assets, which is okay; I'm a biochemistry major, so I came from that world, and I've had to learn, and I do know how complicated something can be. So you definitely want to make sure that the way that you're communicating how like the result is in a way that's simple, quick, and easy to understand and backs up the system so people understand the how your product works so that they can envision it in their lives being used.
Okay, so this brings me to point number four, which is caused is the cure for lack of awareness. I talk to a lot of product creators that spend a lot of time filling out patent applications, getting the prototype just right, and when it comes time to launching the product, they haven't told a single person outside of their team about their product because they don't want to be ripped off. So know that you are—if you get ripped off, it means that you're doing something right. So you hiding your product until you bring it to market; nobody's gonna rip you off in the beginning; they're only gonna rip you off once you start to see traction and sales and ranking. So in that being said, don't let fear of what not getting prevent you from marketing your product ahead of time. So you absolutely want to start building up your audience, talking to friends and family ahead of your launch so that when you do launch, you can have some traction. Now, in saying that, if you have just decided to launch your product with no audience and there's no awareness in the beginning, just keep in mind that what you're getting into is a couple of weeks with no results, and you'll start building your audience up in the beginning. So just with this point, if you're not getting the traction you want in the beginning, take a look at what efforts have you done before launch to actually spread the word, or did you make the conscious decision to not start to market your product until after you validated it and after you have launched your store? That brings me to point number five, where after you've gone through the motions and you've launched your product, and now you just don't know how to do online marketing, okay, which is completely normal because we we spent a lot of time developing this great product; a lot of you guys watching this come from the corporate world, and you're now ready to build your your side hustle empire, and the reality is that now you have to learn to be a marketer, and what you're doing from this point forward is—if you take fulfillment and product design out of what you're doing—from this point forward, you are learning how to sell and market a product. So in the very beginning, if you don't know how to do that, that's completely normal, and there are things you can do to arm yourself to learn to get better because when you're not getting the results you want, but you've got a great product, but you haven't quite fine-tuned the messaging yet, and you don't know how to get in front of more people, um, there is a solution for that. So give yourself some grace when it comes to learning that and starting to get the results. So in that, these are my five strategies to help you identify what can be causing your product to fail; know that it's likely not your product, but there is more due diligence you can do to dig in to get the messaging to resonate with the target audience and things you can do to get better at marketing if it is not something that comes naturally to you. I'm a self-taught marketer; it is possible. So in that, you have just learned how to relaunch your product and successfully really to get traction, coming back from a failure or how to prevent it. Um, if you are someone that's looking for a bit of help to train yourself to become a marketer and get the blueprint to successfully launching and scaling your product online, be sure to check out some of our resources below in this video. But apart from that, thank you for subscribing, but if you haven't subscribed yet, thanks; be sure to do it. We release one video weekly like this to help you online build your empire. So apart from that, be sure to watch another video, and I will talk to you soon. [Music] [Music]