How to Launch Your Startup Without a Launch

Gone are the days of the startup launch party. Remember those nights of trying to explain to a Techcrunch reporter why your app was going to change the world over thumping music and bad venue WiFi?

RIP.

Most startups know not to blow a bunch of money on a big party before they have their first users, but legitimate questions remain about what you do in its place—and how you open yourself up to the world that gets attention.

Founders still want to get press and investors to notice them, but they don’t have a lot of money to work with. What are they supposed to do today?

First of all, if the day you’re thinking about “launching” is when whatever you’re building is close to done, then you’ve already fallen way behind. Starting from zero is incredibly difficult and you’ll be too time crunched to leave it all to one moment. It’s a little bit like trying to cook a Thanksgiving meal but only thinking about it the day of.

Even if you do pull it off, it will be incredibly stressful.

Here are a few things I would do in today’s ecosystem:

Optimize for Conversion

Before you even send people to your site or app, does the front page even make sense. Does it work? Has it been tested across multiple operating systems, mobile and desktop, among different demographics, etc. You want to make sure that if someone comes across it or has it passed to them, they know exactly what it is, what the value proposition is and why they’d sign up for it. If you don’t do this, any marketing and launch activities you do are going to be wasted.

You want sign up flows to be as easy as possible—and you also want sharing to be easy, too. I’m continuously stunned at how much of an afterthought most people make referral systems. You want referrals and the benefits for doing so to be an obvious, upfront feature in the app, coming at the right time. Don’t ask me to add friends before I even know what this thing does or whether its useful.

Be a Value Added Member of the Community

Somewhere there exists a fantastic and thriving community of the kids of people you would like to use your service or app. If their first interaction with you is you trying to leverage that community for sales, you’re going to get blocked. It’s usually against the terms of service anyway—but even if it isn’t, it’s going to be seen as annoying and transactional.

Being an engaged community member creates trust and provides you with valuable feedback—so the day you start working on something, well before you have something to market, you should join and engage in those communities. If you’re not already in them, I do need to ask whether or not you’re actually the right person to be building this thing in the first place. Are you sure you’ve done enough homework to know if this thing is a thing and that you’re building it int he right way if you’re not already deeply engrained in this ecosystem?

Create a Following

One of the things we talk about in the thought leadership course I teach, Visible Work, is to bring people along in the journey, even at the beginning before you have results, polish, or even a service to offer yet. That works because your best way to grow an audience isn’t only by talking about you and your services all the time.

No one wants that.

Instead, talk about your customers, your inspirations, and the people you learn from. Talk about everyone else but yourself—because they all have networks, communities and followings. By spotlighting them in collaborations, you’re able to borrow from their networks and gain like-minded followers of those folks that you share values with.

Launching a pet care product? Spotlight the incredible work being done by no-kill shelters. New coffee brand? Interview people about their coffee routine in a kind of “Coffee Drinkers of NY” account, similar to Humans of NY.

When Tinybop first launched, before they ever made their first app for kids, they started a newsletter that featured products they loved for kids—from everything from books to board games. It was carefully curated by an educational expert and for nine months, it built up a following of thousands of readers. It was worth following if you were a parent and didn’t care about the company at all.

Then, when they were finally ready to launch, they had a whole audience they could launch to that already trusted them. They had built up so much value without asking for anything in return that their audience was inclined to check out what they had built when they announced, “Hey, do you know what we really love? The thing we’ve been building.”

Engaging an audience and building a following is a bit of an entrepreneurship rainy day fund. Even. before you’ve fully fleshed out your idea, once you do, you would rather have a group of people you’ve been regularly publishing to than not.

Collect Contact Information

It’s not enough to have a big following on a social network that has an algorithm between you and your following. You never know if your launch announcement is going to fall flat and just not get seen by your fans because of the black box code that promotes some things over others. Build an e-mail list or an SMS list if you can. Whatsapp groups can work well, too, because most people have notifications turned on and will visit the app everyday. Either way, you want to be able to contact people directly with news of your launch.

How about a petition? What if you were trying to build the next navigation app and you collected a bunch of signatures and e-mails to call for safer streets in your town as part of a submission to local governments. You could e-mail everyone who signed to give them the final count of the petition and remind them why you’re doing it—because you’re building a walkable city app (link!) and you’d like your users not to have to worry about getting hit by a car when they use it.

Be a Press Resource

The landscape has changed. When new consumer apps were all the rage and everyone was looking for the next Facebook, Twitter, etc., there were scores of eger journalists that were falling over themselves to be the first to spotlight a new platform that had promise. It wasn’t long, however, before they realized that covering Facebook, or the new valuation of the latest AI company to raise a billion dollars would get them way more views and engagement than a post about a new app that no one ever heard of. On top of that, a lot of these media models weren’t viable and the number of journalists out there who could cover you is a fraction of what it was.

Now, you have to work 10x harder to get covered. Start building relationships with journalists before you need coverage. Follow and engage with them on social media, comment thoughtfully on their articles, and offer insights on industry trends without pitching your company. Pay for premium subscriptions to indie journalist in your sector because their audience is probably incredibly engaged given that they’re all paying to read.

Be responsive, reliable, and willing to provide data or expert commentary when they need it. Establishing yourself as a knowledgeable, go-to source will make it more natural for reporters to cover your launch when the time comes.

Find A Scalable Event Model

A team in my NYU class that is building a running app went to Central Park and stopped runners as they passed by, asking if they’d like an assessment on their form as a means of preventing injuries. Almost a quarter of the runners that passed by stopped to chat. If you’re used to getting pestered on the street by non-profit folks, you might not feel like field teams work, but coming up with viable IRL models can be a gamechanger when there’s so much online noise to cut through.

Panels, talks, and classes can all be great for the collection of e-mail addresses as well. One of my portfolio companies, Esembly, runs a Cloth Diapering 101 class that nets them more conversions via follow up e-mails than traditional advertising directly to the site gets them. These classes get listed in various class directories and resources for parents—certainly in more spaces than a traditional product advertisement would reach.

There are lots more ideas to be had. Founder podcasts and interviews are a great resource for launch hacks. You just have to make sure that the type of service that was being offered, the context around the launch and its timing are relevant to your current situation.

Best of luck!! Happy to be helpful at this stage if I can.