How to Launch a Startup

For all intents and purposes, launching an internet startup is exceptionally easy nowadays.  Hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to the top blogs and are constantly looking for the latest and greatest services to help them solve their needs. It does, however, require hard work. This is the story of how WebNotes launched our Public Invite-Only Beta and how you can learn from our mistakes.

Preparation: This is where your marketing and strategy prowess comes in handy.

1. Know your product and your competition intimately. The typical SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis is handy to know. Your competitors will certainly bring it up and you need to be prepared when potential customers ask.
2. Know your audience and your target market. There is a HUGE temptation to try to market to everyone, but this is exactly the wrong way to approach it.  For instance, WebNotes chooses to target serious researchers at businesses and universities/schools. Many of our competitors are marketed towards home consumers and those that want to build "communities" around annotation. This small choice now can drastically change how you will be perceived later.
3. Decide the format for your launch. The two theories are: Hollywood launch and Invite-Only Launch (or Gmail Launch to some). At WebNotes, the Gmail style Invite-Only format works amazingly well. It allows us to scale far more easily, anticipate demand, fix bugs quickly, and create a favorable experience for most of our users.  The invite-only status also allows you to "release early, release often". Of course, this depends on your product, so the Hollywood style launch might be more appropriate.
4. Get all of your friends and family to test your product and give you the sanity test. Feedback is king. Once you launch, you want initial expectations to be mostly positive. Anymore, bugs are expected, you just don't want there to be any showstoppers.
5. Set up a Twitter account and start befriending people in your industry.
   

Implementation: Let's hope your strategy pays off.

1. Pick a launch date.  You have no choice but to make this date, so make it reasonable! 
2. Begin talks with all the big blogs that target your niche. This might be ReadWriteWeb, this might be LifeHacker, etc.  Let them know that you are launching and give them your launch date as a "soft-date". You NEED at least one blog to talk about you, so if they write back, you can work around their schedule. Once you get ONE of these big blogs, solidify your launch date. We gave most bloggers a little over a week and a half notice. We thought this was pretty reasonable, but others might have better advice. Coordinate as many blogs as you can to write about you. This takes a lot of time, so make sure you clear your schedule for a long while. (It should be noted that we started going after tiny to medium sized blogs first, almost 2 months before our Public launch. It took ungodly amounts of time, had a very low conversion rate, created some confusion when we wanted to actually launch our full Beta, and was by most accounts unsuccessful. Those that did write about us, however, have been wonderful supporters, sent us some of our early Beta testers, were kind enough to write about us multiple times, and will hopefully write about us again. It probably wasn't the best strategy, but we were lucky enough to get some great support and get fairly lucky. Thank you early writers!)
3. Code your heart out until launch day, stay up all night for the first blogs to hit, and prepare for the worst.
4. Follow what people are saying throughout the blogosphere. Tweet all of your blog reviews (both good and bad). Write POSITIVE comments on the blogs. One of our competitors chose to bash us and some other companies which seemed extremely unprofessional. We also made one comment which was unintentionally seen as disparaging towards Google Notebook. It set off quite the backdraft of negative comments! 
5. Search Twitter to see how people like your product in real time. Here's the Twitter search for Webnotes. Reach out to the people that are commenting. Follow them. See what they don't like.  You should also do the same with FriendFeed.
6. Create a testimonial page with quotes from your users and from product reviews. Let your product shine!
7. When everything has calmed down, write thank you's to the various authors of the blogs that wrote about you. 

Sounds easy, no? Now get to work!

ps. Step is ….profit!