5 Launch!

Now you're on the home straight. You have everything in place to launch your new product or service. You just need the next few steps to go smoothly and you'll have made it to your goal of getting your idea to market.

The products are fully developed, the finishing touches to the branding have been added and you have that first big order. You can almost taste the excitement in the air. Everyone around you is delighted that you've almost made it.

The challenge you have now is to let everyone know that you're open for business, that you're up and running and that they're welcome to come and say hello. If you've opened a physical shop, you'll have to tell everyone in the area; that might mean handing out flyers, advertising in the local paper and offering a special promotion to get people to come in and try you out.

If you're launching online, this is your chance to get bloggers to write about you and link to your site; send samples or offer them the chance to try out your service. You're also going to need to consider the best Google Adwords to buy and other ways of promoting your business both online and off.

If you're bringing a physical product into the world, you will have to seize the moment to get as many people caught up in the launch buzz as possible. You're only going to be the new kid in town for a few weeks, until something else comes along that everyone wants to read about. Don't delay in sending out samples of your products to influential people, handing out freebies at all the right events and making sure that everyone who has registered an interest in your product gets all the information they need for them to want to buy one.

It is important to keep your eye on the ball for the next few months. If something goes wrong with the first production run, for example, the whole thing might fall through. How you decide to go about launching your product is critical because it will be your first impression on the public, the media and your customers; you want it to be as positive as possible.

Start Small

The year or so after the launch of SuperJam was the most exciting period of my life up to that point. What made it so exciting was partly the fact that things were going well, that everything I had worked towards for years was beginning to happen. As well as this, what made it exciting was that it was very risky. If things hadn't gone so well, I could have gone bankrupt.

A lot depends on the business you're looking to start, the economies of scale involved and the type of customers you're trying to attract. In a lot of cases, the best way to get things off the ground is to start on a small scale. Often, people don't get past the starting point because they're aiming too high.

There's no need to try to take over the world from day one. A lot of the time, the best thing to do is to make a small batch of your product or offer your service to a small group of potential customers. Once that is a success, you can cast your net a bit wider and continue to grow in manageable chunks.

Launching on a small scale limits risks because it takes less investment than trying to launch on a huge scale. It gives you a chance to try out your idea before investing a lot of money in producing a huge amount of your product, or taking on employees to deliver your services. At this stage, the more you can do yourself the better, until you are totally sure that your product is solid and the business has the potential to make money.

If you are starting your business at the weekends and in the evenings after work, then launching on a small scale will probably make a lot of sense. This could mean only offering your product in a local area to start with, or to a select group of people who you think will love the idea. There's nothing worse than people launching a product and then not being able to keep up with demand.

You can see if the idea works and then scale up gradually, hopefully one day taking the leap and devoting more of your time to it, perhaps leaving your job to focus on your business full time, or raising the funds needed to turn your fledgling enterprise into a fully formed business, employing people and manufacturing products at scale.

Even though you might well start out on a small scale, you should always maintain a picture of where you ultimately want to take the business. No doubt you will want it to grow and move into bigger premises, employ people and launch a wider range of products. By keeping that in mind and always being focused on what is important to you, you'll be able to make the right decisions to help you get there.

In my case, starting on a small scale by producing jam at home and selling it at farmers' markets and to small shops gave me a very valuable opportunity to learn all about the market. I understood what people wanted from jam, what frustrated them about it; mostly that it contained heaps of unhealthy sugar. They made comments about every aspect of what I was doing, giving feedback on my labels, pricing and recipes. I took on board what they said about my original products and packaging and was ultimately able to develop a mainstream brand and set up production on a larger scale in a factory, as you have seen.

Building a Website

There is no doubt that you should have a website for your business, no matter what you're selling. It might be a few simple pages telling people about your product or it might be a full ecommerce site that allows people to order online. Whatever you need from your site, you should definitely have it up and running and looking great in time for the launch of your product. As soon as people hear about your new product, it'll be the first place they head to for more information, so make sure it's ready for them!

Your website should be as simple and easy to use as possible and really explain your product to people in a matter of seconds. In the same way as designing good packaging, you really have to grab their interest. I personally think that using videos and lots of pictures, rather than pages and pages of words, is the best way to get your message across.

When you're building your website, you should take every opportunity to try to open up a conversation with the people who are interested in your brand. That means having a blog that you update as regularly as possible, links to your Twitter and Facebook pages and videos from you, the founder. All of this helps to capture some of your passion for the topic.

I also think that you should allow people either to pre-order your product or at least to register their interest on the website, even if they are going to have to wait for a few weeks or months. There will always be people who love your idea so much that they want to get their hands on it before anyone else. If you can't take pre-orders for your product, you should definitely collect people's emails with a ‘register your interest here’ page. That way, you can get back in touch with them once you're up and running; hopefully these people who have expressed an interest in your concept will become some of your first few customers .

It is critical to the success of your brand that you take every opportunity to connect with your customers. I'm going to talk about how SuperJam has been able to do that later on in the book, particularly how we've used our website to engage with the people buying our products, but first let's look at the website itself.

The SuperJam Website

We set up a new website designed in the same style as the SuperJam labels. The site also included a blog, which I have since updated every few days with news, stories and ideas. This has proven to be a very powerful way of engaging with SuperJam customers, gaining thousands of regular readers and hundreds of thousands of visitors. We receive a lot of orders on the website, even though it isn't a massive part of the overall business. I think that this success is down to the website being very simple, clean and focusing only on the information that is important: the product range we have, where you can get it from, how much it is, and how to get in touch. You won't find pages and pages of text on there.

On my blog, I write about my ideas, thoughts and generally what I have recently been doing to develop the business. Visitors to the site can follow the story as it develops and also post comments, sharing their own views on my ideas and the products.

Of course, the importance of your website on launch day will depend a lot on the type of business you're starting. If your company is only selling online, it is obviously going to be crucial that the website is up and running in time for your launch.

Beta Launch

In software companies, a usual part of the product launch is to have a ‘beta launch’ before making the website or application available to the general public. The company will allow a select group of consumers or businesses that they trust to use the software. The customers might get to use the product for free or at a heavily reduced price, so that the company can see how well the system works and hopefully gets valuable feedback from this small group of users.

By launching the product with an enthusiastic group of initial customers who are excited to have ‘exclusive’ access, you can create a lot of buzz around the launch. A writer called Kevin Kelly wrote about an idea he had that, rather than trying to ‘make it big’, artistes could focus their energies on nurturing a fan base of their 1,000 truest fans, the people who love their music and are willing to drive across the country to hear them play. By creating music for that group of people, engaging with them and listening to what they say, the artiste can create a very loyal following who are willing to pay good money for what they produce. He suggested that an artiste who has 1,000 true fans could well make a better living than one who is trying to appeal to millions.

I love the idea of finding the 1,000 or so people who are most excited about your idea and letting them be the people who get to try it out first. If they really love the concept, they will be more than happy to give you bucketloads of feedback and ideas. And what is more, when you finally release the product to the public, you'll have used their feedback to make sure that it is spot on. There will be so much mystery and buzz around your product because of the exclusivity you have created that people will hopefully be desperate to get their hands on it. You can maybe even let the ‘beta testers’ choose the next set of people to try it out, by inviting their friends. At the very least, you can use them to promote the launch to their friends and connections, online and offline.

Whether your business is based online or off, it's going to be important that you get out there in the real world and meet potential customers. You need to promote what you're doing to all the right people, to give your business the best possible chance to get off the ground.

Trade Fairs

Whatever industry you're in, there is probably at least one related trade show for it. So you might want to consider using this as an opportunity to launch your product. You can find out about suitable trade fairs by asking people in your industry which ones they go to, or by searching the web; they tend to be promoted quite widely.

All of the relevant people for your particular industry, whether it's cushions or software or potatoes, are likely to be at the trade show, so if you make enough buzz around your launch by getting the event organizers to promote it in the show brochures and on their website, you could potentially get a huge amount of business from it. Stands at trade fairs and other big events can be very expensive, hundreds or maybe even thousands of pounds, but don't be afraid to negotiate with the event organizers. You can sometimes score yourself a bargain, especially at the last minute.

Even if you don't use a trade show as a platform to launch your product, they can be a great place to promote your brand to the right kind of people. Whether you buy a stand or not, you can mingle with the other exhibitors and find out their thoughts on the market. You might find that it is a good place to search for advice, connections and maybe even a mentor. Don't be frightened of going up to exhibitors and asking them all about their product and story. Who did they speak to at Tesco? What are the challenges in their business? Who is their biggest customer? The information they give you could well be like gold dust.

Launch Party!

I think having a launch party for your new business is a great idea. It's an opportunity to mark the start of your business, the point where it all becomes real. It's a chance to thank some of the people who made it possible and, of course, to tell the press all about your story. You can also invite along some of your first customers and suppliers, potential customers and maybe even some celebrities.

What is appropriate for your launch party is entirely down to what your product is. But no matter what you're launching, the event should almost certainly be free to attend for the people you invite, especially the press. You should also bear in mind that the press and celebrities you might hope to attract to your launch are invited to dozens of similar events every week. You are going to need a novel idea for your event, to make it exciting enough for the right kind of people to want to come along.

That hook might be the venue or it could be an interesting speaker you have invited along. Maybe you'll have a live band or some delicious food and drink. Make sure that your event is suitable for the message you are trying to get across. You might want to try to limit the amount you spend on it by getting a sponsor on board or partnering with another brand.

When SuperJam launched, we had an event in my local Waitrose store in Edinburgh. The store manager was very proud that they were able to promote a local business and they made a massive display of jars of SuperJam. The press came along and people drove from 60 miles away to come and see the launch of the brand. It was a massive success and I think we sold something like 1,500 jars of SuperJam on that first day, which was more jam than that store usually sold in a month. In fact, I think it got to the point where if anyone tried to go through the checkout and hadn't bought a jar of SuperJam, the person sat at the checkout would ask why not! It was a fantastic moment to realize that SuperJam had finally arrived.

Announcing the Launch

There is a whole range of things that you can do to announce the launch of your brand and probably at the top of the list is writing a press release. It is one way of telling journalists about your story and, if you do it well, could get you some serious coverage.

Journalists receive literally hundreds of press releases every day, for all kinds of different stories. The trick is to figure out how to get them excited about your story in the first few sentences. Giving them the essence of what the story is should help to grab their attention. For example, ‘Eleanor Brown, a Portsmouth grandmother, will bake the world's biggest brownie this Saturday, to launch her new bakery Ellie's Cakes’, will make them want to read on.

Overall, you want your press release to be fairly short. Nobody wants to read pages and pages about your product launch, especially not journalists. Tell them a bit about your background, how you came up with the idea and what successes you have had to date. Make the release more human by including a few quotes: from yourself, your first few customers and anyone else you think might add colour to the story. You only really need to write enough to give the journalist a good overview of your story and make them curious to read more and, hopefully, to want to interview you.

It is crucial that your press release doesn't simply read like an advert; who would want to read that? It has to be newsworthy, accurate and mustn't exaggerate.

You're going to have to get your press release out as far and wide as possible, and ideally at the same time. You also want the story to go to print at the same time in every newspaper and magazine that chooses to write about it. This might mean telling magazines about it a month before you tell newspapers, due to their differing copy deadlines. You can find out this kind of information by getting in touch with the publications and asking them about the timescales they work towards. As soon as your story is printed it becomes old news, so if you aren't careful with the timings, you will end up being written about in only one or two places, which is likely to make little impact.

You can send your release directly to journalists and newspapers by locating their email addresses from their websites. I'd also recommend checking out press release distribution websites, some of which are focused on news specific to a local area, to help get the release in front of the right people.

If you have the budget to, you might also want to consider taking on a PR agency to help you promote the story. You can expect to spend £1,000–2,000 a month for one, or more if you want them to do a lot of work. Perhaps you could employ their services only for the first couple of months of your business, to help with the launch.

You want to pick the agency that ‘gets’ your story and is most excited about working with you. They are going to be calling up journalists on your behalf, telling them your story. There would be nothing worse than an unenthusiastic agent calling up the journalists to tell them about it when they don't really believe in the idea themselves. The journalists would smell the insincerity a mile off and, chances are, you wouldn't get a lot of press. But if you can find a PR agency that really loves your brand, they'll sound truly authentic when they speak to the press about you and will probably even go the extra mile to help get publicity. It can work really well if you find an agency filled with people who you really like and who really like you.

Since I didn't have much budget to pay for adversing, a PR agency or anything like that, media coverage of my story was going to be a very powerful way of raising the profile of SuperJam.

I had no idea how to get my story out to journalists and so Waitrose suggested that, in exchange for six months' exclusivity of SuperJam, it would help to promote the story. This sounded like a very fair deal to me, so we granted exclusivity to Waitrose for the first six months. The first production run went smoothly and the first order of 12,000 jars was delivered safely to the Waitrose warehouse, ready for the launch. A few weeks later the products went onto the shelves and I was able to act out my dream of buying the first jar myself. I went along to my local Waitrose first thing in the morning and felt very proud seeing all of the jars of SuperJam lined up on the shelves. As part of the exclusive deal, Waitrose was to promote the brand heavily to its shoppers in the in-store magazine, on the shelves and also, most importantly, by sending out a press release to the national press.

Little did I know at this point quite how my story would capture the imagination of the international media.