A short preface to this post: although I speak below to launching products in a startup I think what I’ve experienced applies to any company looking to launch something new: be it product, market or service. As per Eric Ries, every company, no matter how large, has the ability to react quickly like a startup.

Let me take you back to March 2010 when we were trying to figure out how to grow our company and appeal to the market in a new way. Back then we had just a few recurring customers and relatively insignificant revenues. Don’t get me wrong – we loved every customer, but there weren’t necessarily high expectations.

We were perceived as a startup, so our customers approached with caution. They knew (because we’d warn them) that everything was subject to change. Expectations around pricing, product, and support simply did not exist. We were ‘fresh and new’ and our early adopters were coming along for the ride. In many ways, there was little we could do wrong. Oh how simple life was!

Fast forward a little more than three years. We decided to do it again: launch a brand new extension of what we do. I’m not talking about adding a feature – I’m talking about a groundbreaking new product that could be used by our existing customers in new and relevant ways, but also stand alone away from our legacy product.

We were eager to build something new all over again. But this time things were different. We had grown to over 1,300 recurring customers who relied on us for critical business, communication and promotional needs. Our pricing was built into budgets, our customers expected our product to function in  a specific way, and most importantly, consistent service delivery was a necessity. Our customers now had expectations – and rightfully so. I guess you could say we were a legitimate business. And although I hope we never stop thinking like one, by 2013 many of our customer stopped seeing us as a startup.

My co-founder Yoav (who is instrumental in driving product and company vision) and I started to refer to this undertaking as launching a startup within a startup – or as he more eloquently describes it in part 1 of this post: intrapreneurship.

Having recently completed the launch of this new experience, which we call Hubs, I thought I’d share some takeaways from my experience from an operational and logistics perspective for any brand faced with a similar circumstance. There are literally hundreds of checklist items I could cover. Yoav went over many of the product related decisions so I will focus on some of the marketing, pricing, support, launch and messaging decisions that were made here at Uberflip.

Pricing

Let’s start with the trickiest one of all. I’m not going to beat around the bush: one of the main reasons we developed Hubs was because we felt we could provide more value to our customers than we previously were. If we could add more value, surely we could charge more money! Any marketer charged with selling goods or services is focused on increasing the ARPU (average revenue per user). This doesn’t matter if you’re Apple trying to get me to buy iCloud storage for my iPhone or Verizon looking to increase what I spend on data.

I’m not going to turn this post into a pitch so take my word for it that it was pretty easy for us to justify higher price points for Uberflip with the inclusion of Hubs. But here was the tricky part: do we increase our price to current customers? Actually,  it wasn’t that tricky – we knew doing so would be a bad idea. In fact, I respect companies like Zendesk who grandfather pricing for their early customers (like us). The tactical challenge  was determining how to communicate the change and which customers would get which features as we realigned packages to introduce the new offering.

The first time we launched in 2010 we started with no packages so we could easily build to suit new customers. This time we had to find a way to mesh our new pricing model and existing customers’ expectations. I won’t bore you with the details of how we got here other than to urge you to think outside the box.

Figure out what your customers perceive they are actually paying and determine if you can adjust where you highlight value without causing concern. We’re still getting feedback and determining if we got the right value proposition in our new pricing – but I’m happy to say that very few customers were upset about how we migrated them to the new model.

Support & Communication

These two words need to go hand in hand through any significant launch, especially when you have existing users who are certainly going to get overwhelmed. I’ve always believed that if you manage expectations you can manage emotions. In a previous work life, I had to deliver a product to people’s homes. Sometimes we’d mess up and scratch a wall carrying in the goods. I always found that calling the customer to warn them before they got home resulted in a more calm reaction compared to them finding the scratch and calling me.

This real life experience can be used as an analogy to any product or service release. Make sure your customers know what they’re coming home to! We spent a lot of time ensuring that our current customers knew what was going to change. Some of the key elements to our communication strategy included: email notices, internal application notifications in the days leading up to the launch, and access to live and recorded webinars.

We made sure our knowledge base was filled with how-to articles that went live the morning of our big push. The team creating these resources were involved and aware of their responsibilities well in advance so we weren’t cramming in the final days. The one area I think I could have done better myself is arming our entire team with the tools to combat some of the somewhat obvious FAQs that came up. Don’t forget that when you have an existing business you’ll have some team members less involved in your launch and focused on maintaining the existing flow. Take time to bring all of these people up to speed so they can contribute with context when you flip the switch.

Launch

As outlined above, there were a lot of changes at the same time when we launched Hubs. I’ll default back to Eric Ries who emphasizes that you shouldn’t rush a product or marketing launch and that they don’t have to happen at the same time.

You are likely introducing a lot of ‘new’ at once so take time to evaluate. Your messaging on day 1 vs day 90 is likely to change, as may your offering depending on your ability to iterate.

We actually launched in various stages, which I’ll summarize in three key dates.

Phase 1 – Private Beta Launch

This was a launch back in May 2013 to paying customers only. There was no press release, no change to our website. The only thing our marketing team created was a fun landing page (which we’ve since retired as the messaging has changed) to explain the need. We also crafted strategic emails to nurture early adopters through the experience. No one who was on a free trial was onboarded to our new beta product. Rather, we welcomed paying customers to use the product at no cost during the beta period. This allowed us to build a decent sized beta group who we called for feedback over the coming months.

Phase 2 – Product & Pricing Launch

This happened in  early September and was by far the most change we ever saw happen to our site, application, terms, offering and many more details. Our marketing, support, billing and obviously developer teams  were working long hours and polishing non-stop prior to launch.

Nevertheless, when we released the product, we made no announcements other than to our current customers to ensure they were aware of the coming changes. We wanted to ensure a smooth switch, quickly find any bugs and validate that our paying customer base was happy and able to navigate the new bells and whistles we had dropped in their laps.

Phase 3 – Public Launch

Roughly a week later we began talking about Hubs to new prospects. We officially unveiled our new baby at an event called Content Marketing World, which is run by major thought leaders in our space: CMI. We followed this up with attendance at other key events like the MarketingProfs B2B Forum. We issued a press release, but since it was heavily product focused it did not grab the attention we had ignorantly hoped for. Phase 3 is an ongoing undertaking which we’ll continue to execute on over the coming months.

I think an important lesson I learned through the process is that your launch is not a one-day event. Rather, it’s an ongoing pursuit to educate the market. Our team has debated whether we should have drawn out Phase 2 of our launch into mini stages to better evaluate the impact of some of the changes on our conversion path and metrics. There is a fine balance between a launch which is patient and calculated versus simply letting it loose and learning. Not sure if we nailed the balance ourselves but I urge you to really map out your launch on a calendar that the team as a whole can rally and prepare around.

Persona Evaluation

As important as it is to focus on your current customers base, it is important to note that your new offering is often designed to appeal to a new market segment. Simple tweaks of your nurture emails or updates to your product features page may not be enough. I urge to to start with a clean slate here.

We likely took the wrong approach to this by starting in the middle somewhere before we realized the need to really understand the Persona who may use Hubs. There’s a lot of great content out there on how to build out a persona profile including this one from Hubspot or  in lesson 2 of our very own Content College.

Once you’ve figured out who you’re marketing to, there’s a laundry list of to do’s that will vary based on your marketing strategy. We had to look at adding new nurture emails, identifying new key decision makers, and ultimately figuring out the role of our success and sales team in guiding a prospect to convert.

I’ve covered a lot of points above but perhaps the most important bit of advice is to not get locked up in your office. Both your current and new customers will give you amazing feedback – so go talk to them. We showed a number of customers what we were working on before we even hit private beta.

Understanding their perception to price and product changes were key to ensuring we kept customers happy. And although I’m not a big fan of events, they are perhaps the best place to practice your new pitch on your new audience given the opportunity for quick adjustments and testing. So get out there, whether it’s attending a conference or meet up, and see if your new product is aligned to public perception of your brand as a whole. If it isn’t, your launch has just begun!

Do you have an “intrapreneurship” story or insights you’d like to share? Do so in the comments below!

About the Author

As COO, Randy runs around daily between strategy, operations, sales and execution of Uberflip's awesomeness.

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