Cancelling Launches and Making Decisions Based on Business

Yesterday I mentioned to my subscribers I had a special announcement, incidentally if you are not a subscriber, you can signup on the right and grab a great free report.

Anyhow, what was the announcement?

Cancelling Launches and making Decisions based on my Business Needs

On the 9th of June, John Thornhill and I were set to complete and launch a new product about product launches and how to launch your own product and make it a success! You may have noticed that I used the word ‘were’. Well there is a reason behind this which I will explain..

Launching a product

Launching a product is easy! Launching a product and making money is not easy. You see you need to plan your campaign to the most finite detail, so you leave nothing on the table. You need to cover all the angles to make the most revenue you possibly can from your target audience. I cover product launches in more detail here if you are interested.

Planning and time, is the reason why we made the decision to cancel the launch on Monday and put it back to a date later in the year. Now this wasn’t an easy decision to do considering the work we have put into this over the last few weeks, but it could have been harder. Fortunately, we had not moved into pre-launch or notified affiliates, so not a lot of people knew about it or that we were cancelling it for a month or two.

The lack of launch buzz was also a factor in cancelling the launch. You see you need to let people know what is going on, what to expect and when to expect it. Having a great product is only a small portion of the launch as a whole! Missing a critical element can be detrimental to your product launch and this can end in disaster.

Picture this

I took a call from John last week where we started to plan the week out to get ready for announcement on Wednesday the 4th which was realistically already too late to gather any real affiliates or build an affiliate competition buzz. The conversation went a little like this:

John – So are you good for a meet up on Tuesday, I’m good for later in the day as I have calls?

Dan – It’s my birthday on Tuesday, Emma has booked a meal for the family! How about Wednesday?

John – It’s Nicola’s birthday on Wednesday and we are going out for the day and It’s my Birthday on Thursday?

Dan – Lol, not much getting done here is there?

John – This is bad, how about working all day Friday?

Dan – Ok, I’ll get what I can done from home today and work all day tomorrow so we are ready to announce to affiliates on Wednesday. We can finish up on Friday and Saturday morning for launch on Monday

John – Ok

Dan – Oh shit, Emma has arranged a birthday BBQ for me on Saturday, so can’t make it then. This is bad isn’t it?

John – Yeah it’s not good at all. Lets just put everything into Asana and work through job by job and get it finished

Dan – Ok

John – Ok

I pretty much put a solid two days into the product, working with our graphics guy and building the Optimize press members’ area ready for content at the weekend.

Time to be realistic

We had a 7 day window of opportunity to launch a product for which we could have done at a push! But thinking about it, we are launching a product about product launches, so your own product launch model has to be perfect! Yes we would have made money, yes we would have recruited some affiliates but not all, yes the content is good and the product would be a success! But, we needed everything to be perfect and it just wasn’t looking to 100%.

You can say that no product launch is perfect, and you would be right. There are always unforeseen factors, but soft launching a product about product launches is potentially a recipe for disaster!

So we took a hard decision to put the launch back a couple of months to fit into another launch period, where we can create a massive launch campaign, add more content and provide something truly amazing!

Planning is essential

It is possible to wing a product launch, but it’s never going to be as good as full product launch campaign with affiliate support, ads and pre-launch buzz. Here are a few tips to help you out when you are planning your next project:

1. Give yourself ample time to get your project finished and ready
2. Ensure everyone who needs to know knows about it
3. Don’t cut corners to get to a deadline
4. If your product isn’t ready, don’t announce it just because you have a gap in your schedule
5. Ensure you make the most from your launch and leave nothing on the table.

It wasn’t easy to move our launch, but a decision had to be made to ensure we ge the most from it in the future. The risk of it not generating it’s full potential was too great to risk!

Can you think of a time when you thought of cancelling launches based on a business decision or a time when you weren’t ready and had to hold a product or project?

 

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