Your MVP may not be as viable as you think
A pervasive mistake I see is companies waiting too long—usually during beta testing—to start thinking about how they’ll announce their product. The excuse is always that they’re too busy building it. Totally get it. But building an MVP without a strong plan for the announcement will become a launch that falls flat. Instead, you must build your product with the announcement in mind. And to do that you need an MMP—Minimum Marketable Product.
Building a product, any product, is difficult. When it’s the early days and you’re down in the trenches, it’s hard to fathom thinking about anything else. Though I have no doubt that the app you’re building, or other service, is complex and requires deep thought, I also know it’s possible to build something incredibly complicated and nail the marketing, too.
From their start SpaceX has had one core mission: get people to Mars. Everything they do is in some way, shape, or form, contributing to that overall goal. Though they’re not selling a product to the public, they do still have to market themselves. Which they do an excellent job of.
Their recent launch - The Crew Dragon Demo-2 which sent 2 astronauts to the space station - was a spectacular display of product and marketing coming together for a great launch. First, they kicked things off with a launch countdown timer with live feeds of the rocket and astronauts.
Next, they had real-time scripted commentary hosted by Nasa and SpaceX walking us through the deployment stages. Since most of us aren’t rocket scientists, having that insight helped engage the audience further.
Finally, they showed off one of their most revolutionary items: reusable boosters. Not only that, but when they successfully landed using the boosters, they showed the astronauts give each other a congratulatory fist-bump. Was that mission critical? No. But, was it great marketing? Yes.
Regardless of industry, product, or organizational structure, a common mistake I see is that companies wait too long—usually during beta testing—to start thinking about how they’ll announce their product. That is a recipe for an announcement that falls flat.
If you wait until the beta to start thinking about marketing, you’re missing out on the foundational product strategy work that will make your launch a success.
Minimum Viable Product vs. Minimum Marketable Product
You’re probably familiar with the idea of descoping down to ship the minimum viable product (MVP), “ship to learn”, “fail fast” and other incremental release concepts aimed to de-risk product development.
MVP is a learning vehicle that allows you to test an idea by exposing an early version of your product to target users in order to collect data and to learn from it. But shipping a slow drip of tiny feature improvements is sadly not how you get people to notice you.
Enter the Minimum Marketable Product—the product with the smallest possible feature set that addresses the user needs, creates the desired user experience, and can be marketed and sold successfully. It’s a mindset shift as much as anything but rather than focussing on shipping incremental value, you make sure people are aware of your product, care about it, and understand how to use it. And to do that, you need to craft your product story when the problem is defined rather than when the solution is built.
If you know your product story, you can start much sooner to drive more awareness with pre-launch tactics. And I don’t just mean generic content marketing stuff that anyone could create. I mean a cohesive narrative arc that sets your product up so strongly, that when you finally launch the reaction is “yes of course, this company gets it and they are the perfect team to solve my problem.”
Building your plan
There are a lot of go to market checklists floating around the internet tubes but in my experience, there really are 13 marketing stages to taking a new product to market.
Understanding customers
Competitor research
Problem statement and solution story
Product positioning
Product messaging
Product development
Beta testing (←do not wait until now!)
Develop announcement campaign
End to end user testing
Product QA
Training teammates
Execute announcement
Measure and improve
If you haven’t done product launches yourself, you might look to see how others do it.
The problem is, you only see a tiny fraction of the marketing work that goes into a launch—the part that goes live in an email and on a website. But there are a whole slew of things that happen to build up to the actual announcement.
Most teams wait until the product is in beta to involve marketing. But by doing so, they miss out on the valuable intel that comes from testing your messaging just like you test your product.
Telling your product story
During my time at Intercom, I led the go-to-market effort from start to launch for one of their biggest releases: Articles, an integrated knowledge base for self-service support. Articles (formerly called Educate) was 14 months in the making and launched in December 2016.
An effective way to craft your product story is to root it in your mission and your product differentiator. For example, Intercom’s mission is to make internet business personal. And their product differentiator is The Intercom Messenger. So we knew the product story had to involve those two components.
Based on our research, we felt that products in the market were impersonal, full of dead ends, and didn’t enable continuous improvement. So, From the beginning we knew that the launch story would be that this help center is personal and intelligent.
Having that insight not only helped guide marketing, but also product. Instead of worrying about features that didn’t support those key messages like tables, nested lists and advanced analytics, we focused our energy on what did. For example, we showed articles that worked great in the Messenger.
We also suggested articles to customer support reps to share with customers and built in actionable feedback loops so that the people writing the articles knew exactly how to improve the article. Most importantly, there were no dead ends for customers.
The launch was a huge success, and was in no small part due to the collaboration between marketing and product early, as opposed to later.
Great products deserve great marketing
Having the best product in the world doesn’t matter if no one knows about it. And in order to let the world know about your product, you first need a story to tell. When you know your product story you can prioritize features to build a more compelling product and start selling the problem long before the launch.
If you’re not sure how best to do that, consider joining The Founder’s Marketing Playbook.
That way, when you make your announcement you’ll drive revenue and usage, which is what we all want for the products we work so hard to build.
