Quick tips
- Pick the date first; the checklist shrinks to fit.
- One sentence, three places, one ordinary morning.
- Plan the second telling before the first one lands.
The thing is finished. It works, you are proud of it, and the only step left is telling people it exists. Somewhere in the last two weeks that step turned into a project of its own: a checklist of forty items, most of them about the announcement rather than the product, and a growing sense that if the day is not big enough the thing will not count.
It will count. A launch is a day you tell people, and that is all it has ever been. The version that works for a business with one person in it is small, dated and repeatable: one sentence, three places where your people already are, and a shop that is still open the next morning with nothing changed. You are not trying to win an afternoon. You are trying to start a habit of telling people. The second telling and the third are where most of the customers actually come from.
What counts as a launch when nobody knows me yet?
A date, one sentence about what you made, and three places where the people who might want it already are. Everything else on the checklist is optional, and most of it exists to make the day feel important rather than to sell anything.
Launch advice is mostly written for companies with an audience, a press contact and a budget. You have a phone and a list of people. The useful news is that the small version is not a weaker copy of the big one. It is a different thing that works better at your size, because people who buy from a one person business are buying from the person, and a person can only be in a few places at once.
Pick the date first, before you touch the checklist. That is not a scheduling trick, it is the method: fixing when and where you will act is one of the better studied ways to turn an intention into something that actually happens. The date also does the cutting for you. A launch three weeks out has room for forty tasks. A launch on the twelfth has room for six, and the six that survive will be the six that mattered.
How do I write the one sentence?
Say what it is, who it is for, and what it costs, in that order and in plain words. If you can say it out loud to a friend without flinching, it is finished.
I make cotton aprons with real pockets, for people who cook every day, and they are 48 dollars. I edit podcasts for people who record more than they can keep up with, from 90 dollars an episode. Nobody needs a tagline. Nobody has ever bought anything from a one person business because of a tagline.
Two words to delete: just and kind of. They arrive uninvited and they tell the reader you are not sure. I just make a kind of apron is the same information with the confidence taken out of it.
Say it out loud once before the day, to one person, and watch their face at the price. If they do not blink, you are fine. If you catch yourself adding a justification after the number, delete the justification rather than the number.
Write the sentence a week before the date, read it once on the morning, and send it exactly as written. The urge to improve it at nine on launch day is not craft. It is nerves, and nerves have never once made a sentence shorter.
Where do I tell people if I have no audience?
Three places where your people already stand: the group, forum or club they are in, the ten or twenty individuals who would genuinely want this, and one public post wherever you already have a handful of followers. Three is enough, because a first sale comes out of a conversation rather than out of reach.
Write the three places down beside the date. Choosing them in advance is what stops the day turning into six hours of refreshing one app. The group you already belong to counts double, because the people there understand what the thing is without you explaining it.
Choose the group carefully. One place where people already talk about the thing you make beats five places where you are a stranger with a link. If you have been reading a forum for a year without posting, that is your first place, and the fact that you were useful there before you needed anything is why the post gets read at all.
Message the individuals one at a time, with their name in it and the price included. Ten separate messages take twenty minutes, and every one of them lands in front of somebody who might actually reply. A blast is a performance. A message is a conversation, and a conversation can end in a sale.
The public post is the least important of the three, and it is the one people spend all week on. Write it, post it, close the app, and go do something with your hands.
What if barely anybody responds on the day?
That is the normal shape of a first launch and it is not a verdict on the product. The first telling reaches people who already know you, which is a small number by definition, and the orders usually arrive on the second and third telling instead.
So decide in advance what the day is for. It is not for a sales figure. It is for making the thing public, getting the sentence out of your head, and finding out which of the three places produced a reply. Write those two or three replies down. They are the beginning of a customer list.
Watch what people ask rather than what they buy. Three people asking whether it comes in a larger size is worth more than eleven likes, and it is the only free market research you will ever get.
And leave the price alone for two weeks. Dropping it on day two teaches the people who were about to buy that waiting is rewarded, and it answers a question nobody has actually asked yet.
The morning after, and the month after
Open the shop, change nothing, and go about your day. A week of leaving it alone is worth more than a week of adjusting, because you cannot learn anything from a page that is different every time somebody looks at it.
Then plan the second telling before the first one has even landed. Put it in the calendar: two weeks out, then a month after that. Almost nobody buys the first time they hear about something, and spreading out the times you say it beats saying it repeatedly in one burst, which is one of the most reliable findings in the study of memory. A launch you can run again next month beats one you had to survive.
Make the second telling different rather than louder. Show the thing in use, answer a question somebody actually asked, or say what you learned in the first two weeks. Nobody minds hearing about your work twice when the second time carries something new, and the second post is easier to write than the first because by then you have a customer to write about.
That is the real reason to keep it quiet. Not modesty, and not lowering the ambition. A launch small enough to repeat is a launch you can run twelve times this year, and twelve tellings by a steady person beats one loud afternoon by an exhausted one, every time.
Sources
- U.S. Small Business Administration, Launch your business
- Frontiers in Psychology, A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment
- Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Parallels between spacing effects during behavioral and cellular learning