Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Nathan Parcells
Today our company launched our intern matching services from Washington State to the entire west coast. I am a little bit sleep deprived, a little bit antsy to see our first new users from CA and OR apply for internships, and very excited for the next couple of weeks, months, and years. While today’s launch is mostly surrounding our new batch of west coast internships (no significant design or product changes), and while we are launching with slightly fewer new positions than we predicted when determining our launch date months ago, we have made a huge transition from a local to a tri-state company and the excitement is pervasive. I wanted to share my thoughts with you on the value I see in continually launching and doing so publicly. (And, if you’d like to share yours we would love your feedback on our new work study calculator, and internship pages in San Francisco, Portland, and LA). So to get into it:
Why I love a good launch:
First, I wanted to share why I love launches and think a startup should have one or two ambitious and highly publicized launches each year.
Whether shipping a new product, planning an expansion into a new city, or simply targeting some new user benchmark; a launch galvanizes a team into working long hours towards a rewarding end goal. In addition, an official launch date, that is predetermined and highly publicized, forces you to ship your product ON TIME, something that I think happens too rarely, but makes you hone your release to what is truly needed.
I have quickly learned over the past year plus working on InternMatch, that while a good launch provides unique opportunities for press coverage, investor updates, sales, and much more, the most important benefits (and the only guaranteed ones) come from accelerating towards internal goals and pushing the team forward.
My second favorite part about a launch is all the feedback you get:
In my opinion when choosing to launch you are deciding between two options. One, you can slowly release new products, features, and expansions as they become available and mostly under the radar. Or two, you can pool these new advances into the back end and save them for one bigger roll out date which marks a more noticeable step forward.
Both strategies have value, the first allows you to experiment, tweak and constantly improve new products without the heightened expectations of a public launch. However, the second, the launch, is great for re-engaging people with your company. With the trickle approach you are less likely to achieve some really noteworthy new change, worthy of an email full of !!!s to all your investors, advisors, and friends. However, a launch will spark interest from all the relationships you have built over time, and creates the opportunity to sit back down with people who have been involved with your company and discuss how far you have come (and where you need to go).
AND the best part is you can do all this without a perfectly polished launch. It doesn’t need to be perfect because no matter what it is a big step forward, which brings me to my next point…
I may now sound like a broken record, but publicize your launch date ahead of time and stick with it:
I see a lot of startups that push back launch dates, for weeks and then months. I realize sometimes this is necessary but frequently it is not. One of the biggest values of a launch if to test how far you can get from A to B, when everyone rallies around a central goal and with a capped time limit. There will always be more tweaking to be done, more listings to add, more features that would make for a better news story, but to be honest most of the time it doesn’t matter.
Really a launch date is more of a window anyways. You work until hour zero and expect to catch up on sleep that next day but instead spend a couple more 18 hour days working out bug fixes and other tweaks. Then you spend the next few weeks taking in feedback and making updates and changes. You are a startup, not Microsoft or Google, and so most of the time the only person who is expecting a perfect release is you (also worth noting that even these juggernaut companies recognize the benefits of releasing unfinished beta products to garner mass user feedback).
In the end, a good launch is like growing taller:
If you are like most the startups I have met, you likely work long hours, underpaid for the majority of the year. It is crucial to every now and then think as a team about where you want to be in 4-6 months as it relates to your overall execution plan, and then say let’s do it and set the tasks and projects in motion to get you there. As the time before launch winds down there is generally a lot more you want to do, some of which doesn’t make the cut. Usually though, after taking a day to relax and perhaps celebrate with a few beers you will likely find, that like growing taller as a child, you’ll be amazed at people’s feedback who see how far the company has come and how noticeable it is when your not around it every day.
