When going out to sell your product, you not only have to take into account financial aspects of the degree of product development but also know what your window of opportunity is. Do you risk going out too soon? What are they ahead of you? None of the above …? why not create product demo videos?

When you are developing the first version of your product, you are still hypothesized: you don’t know exactly what your client wants. But you not only have to validate your product but also if your model is scalable. It works, but do you have a chance to grow?

It seems incredible, but it is difficult to decide when your product is ready. You have to know how to take a step back: see what you have done, how much you have left to do, where you are going … The pace at which the company consumes the resources with which it starts before starting to have income is important. Your output has to be synchronized with your box.

This is not math. No two sectors are the same. Each of them has different dynamics. The first objective of a business is to achieve sales that it does not have and that these grow. Everyone understands how they can achieve this increase in sales: advertising, promotional campaigns, pricing strategies … To achieve this, the product has to be available on the market as soon as possible.

How much of minimum and viable?

An entrepreneur in the gamification sector points out: ”While we were developing our technology platform, I believed that the most important thing was to get a Minimum Viable Product (PMV) as soon as possible. But it is a high risk to go out with a half product. You have to be fast, yes, but the product has to meet expectations. If in the first impact you have on the market, the prescribers you want to draw attention to do not consider that the product is good, then it will be very difficult for you to change their opinion when you re-launch that product with improvements. We were always in the dilemma of speed and quality: you can’t bring anything to the market. In your case, Another entrepreneur in the fitness sector affirms: “We, honestly, were late to the market: we were more than two months late, but we were not ashamed of the product we put out.”

This does not mean that no sector can take advantage of the strategy of launching a product with the minimum functionalities to take the pulse of customers and see if your product satisfies a need and if they are willing to pay for it through the channel from that you offer it.

Validate your customers first

In the technology sector, it is common for entrepreneurs to have many ideas of functionalities, but before developing them all and taking two more years to go on the market and someone gets ahead of them, come out with a PMV with the basic technology, which already has been validated, and wait for customers to say what they need. If a line is seen to be working, it continues. If not, you try to go for another. To get to that PMV, however, you must first ask potential customers what they need.

When exactly do you launch the product?

Before putting your product on the market, you already have to be thinking about the strategy and the moment of the launch. “In our case, for example, we had information on the next applications that we are going to launch on our website… When I started, by putting an application on sale, the same day you did it, you were already selling 200 or 300 for the whole nose. Not now. In these moments you put an application for sale and you go directly to be history. About 1,000 apps are launched every day, so visibility is zero. You need to make it look good: some good keywords for the AppStore, a good icon, some good screenshots for the product sheet… If not, you don’t sell anything. And all that work is prior to the launch of the product. The real key is when you start the marketing campaign. If you do it the day you publish the application, you are going wrong. The most important point is the day it goes on sale. To do this, a month before you have to have contacted bloggers ”, says an entrepreneur.

This strategy is common for many startups, especially those dedicated to the development of applications and games, but that does not mean that all markets or all products have to go so fast.

Delay departure if …

One of the most difficult decisions is having to delay the launch until you can offer the product the way you want it. Even if you are a startup, not everything is online marketing strategies, SEO and SEM. Many have an offline sale, and wearing out shoe soles takes time.

There are markets in which very high expectations are generated and which require going slowly. In addition, what you say or your marketing strategy is not valid, but what customers say to each other based on their experience in using your product. You must be cautious in the commercial launch.

Do you wait for investors?

When, then, do you have to lose patience to jump? “When we started, the financing started to take many months. Every time they asked us for more information, it was very slow, and we wanted to launch as soon as possible. We made the first attempt, open to the public, without funding, after having previously validated a beta version. We only had our own resources, already almost exhausted. We launched it without advertising, without marketing, only taking advantage of the word of mouth of the users that we already had from the beta. It was a low-key launch, but it gave us more information and has helped us with the commercial work and also with obtaining financing. We had to convince investors that it could work. That was what held them back: they weren’t sure what our platform could be.

How are you going to grow sales?

Once you launch, how do you manage to encourage sales? The theory could not be simpler: you update and improve your product, or launch cross-selling programs with other products (yours or external, through cross-selling or next selling), or you divide the product and sell the parts or test strategies to get your first customers attract more customers. The lowest common denominator to all of them is to improve the product.

What pricing strategy do you come up with?

Yes, ‘strategies’, not ‘strategy’ in the singular. We are sorry, but there is no single formula. The common denominator to all the projects we have consulted is that your product has to have a price if you want the measurement of customers to be real: if you give it away, you will get information, but you will not know why they are really willing to pay … and how much.

Below the competition

A technology entrepreneur says: “With our prices, we want to cover development and user costs, but never exceed the price of licenses. It is a very scalable product, but we don’t want to go over the price either, because if the client makes very intensive use of our product, they may think that it will be cheaper to buy a license from the competition ”.

Above the competition

An interesting testimony: “we could not go below the price of our competition: we provide significant added value to customers that none of the other manufacturers is capable of providing. That was our niche. They were already struggling to sell a lot of cameras and lower the price, especially now that they compete with the Chinese market in general-purpose infrared cameras.”

Advance payment

The investments to start manufacturing a product from scratch are high. As you will need a guarantee from the client, you can demand a percentage in advance for the engineering project to finance the development and provide guarantees for external financing.

When do you start investing in marketing?

You do marketing from day one, but you add wood when you have a funnel that converts [that is, when the relationship between your first sales efforts translates into meaningful sales], which is worth it. If you know the funnel is not working, discard it. The first thing you have to achieve is to optimize it. If you are serious about investing in marketing, you have to have something that can be sold today and not what could be sold when it is fully ready.

Think of an app. Don’t start by investing 100,000 $ in marketing in 15 countries. First, invest 1,000 $ in a marketing campaign for a country and measure. The product does not have to be 100%, but it is not necessary to burn 100% of your resources in your first market launch.

There are traditional businesses, think of a neighborhood hairdresser or a nursery, in which marketing starts with a traditional mailbox campaign. In these cases, the campaign should start before the store is ready, but not so far in advance that customers come and it is closed. You also have to measure it: you send so many triptychs, so many people come to you. From there you decide if you invest more or not. It’s not about putting all the money into the marketing mega campaign. In the case of a business like a daycare, seasonality also plays a role: that campaign, perhaps, does not have to be strong until the deadline for applications for public daycare centers. Or think of a language school in a town, which is still a local business.

When do I get into good contact?

Get fired first with those customers who are not as appetizing. Test your viable minimum with them. And then you make the leap to that important customer. The first impression is often decisive. It allows you to gain muscle with your arguments and you put your value proposition to the test in a less risky environment. If you go directly to see a great contact and you have not tested it before with good clients, then they may not listen to you again. When to go? When you feel strong enough and your product is minimally presentable to burn that cartridge but think very hard.

If there is at least one person on the team with knowledge of the sector who has contrasted which clients you are going to target, with what value proposition, through which channel, how you are going to differentiate yourself, and with what revenue model, You can consider meetings with large clients before having the product finished.

How do I propose the exit of the product?

The use of technologies, changes in values and the crisis situation force us to modify the ways of approaching the current consumer. To connect with them, you have to diversify more than ever the channels and the ways to get there. We give you three keys to achieve it.

1. New ways to segment them

The future is going to do much more sophisticated marketing and attack more specific niches. People are much more diverse, plural, and contradictory than we think. Ideal types that do not exist are used. And if they exist, they are few.

How to reach such a plural consumer? By trends, values, and lifestyles. Or for what you need at a certain time (thanks to the mobile you can) or at a certain stage (pregnancy …).

The social consumer must be classified by role. When you go on the Internet and want to study a community, for example, naval modeling, what difference does it make how old they are, if they are men or women if what unites them is a taste for that? It is naive to believe that society can be reduced to percentages.

2. New ways to approach them

25 years ago, a leading television program reached a 30% share, now getting a 14% is a triumph. The audience is more fragmented and saturated. Three out of four households already dodge all advertisements. Hence, the trend is to bet on the quality of the messages instead of the quantity. The new marketing seeks to integrate into the daily life of the consumer, with environmental, experiential or internet marketing campaigns. The idea is that advertising attracts attention, without disturbing.

The key is to follow in the footsteps of brands like Red Bull and their stratospheric leap. What they did was a universal event, but you can make a local event, something that generates conversation, that is interesting for people, because of curiosity or challenge, that draws attention and becomes content.

3. New messages

We must also change the content we send. A more disbelieving and saturated audience asks for more sincere content, based on values, emotions or that have a surprise effect. In short, we are going to advertising that seeks more than ever to break schemes. For example, creating messages that recognize the weaknesses of brands. Avis already did it years ago with a slogan in which it recognized that they were second in the market, but that it is difficult for them to be because the leader is very good. Brands do not have to be companies with a pristine, serious, modern, technological image … It is tiresome that they are all leaders, that they are the best sellers.

Source: animated video production company