Product Launch? Building Hype and Exclusivity
Artificial scarcity for a product launch can work when it’s done right, but only when at the core, you’re building a product people love.
Gaby Goldberg posed this great question on Souffle Club a little while ago.
For those who don’t know, Souffle Club is a new space for unbiased debates on tech topics. Interesting questions are posted every 3 days, and folks answer, and the community votes on the best answers. But the twist is…you don’t know WHO you’re voting for till after you cast your vote!
So the insights that end up winning do so because of the merit of their argument, rather than the brand of the author.
It was clear that the community converged on a common theme:
Falsely engineered exclusivity during a product launch doesn’t win if there isn’t a core product that people love behind it.
It’s valuable to check out the winning answers for the poll. You can see the best answers that rose to the top as well as the ones that Gaby liked the most. And hey, you can add your voice to the mix too.
Key takeaways for an ideal product launch… Read on!
1.Exclusivity for a product launch helps you have more control over your initial audience: If you’re building a community product, then more often than not, you need a niche audience to kickstart the community.
Exclusivity helps you be more targeted about who you let in early on. Maybe you need more aspirational users and influencers to be your seed audience during your product launch. Maybe you want to focus on a particular category or niche.
When you have a well-defined target user, you can control exclusivity through invite-only registrations and waitlists, and hey the FOMO is always a bonus!
2. Make your users so happy they’ll evangelize your product! Hype comes from people talking about a product.
When you build a product that people love, they can’t help talking about it and sharing it out. That should be your first goal while launching your product, and then you market it with everything you’ve got!
3. Bring on the influencers: A tweet from an influencer during a product launch is a voice on a loudspeaker. Use it and use it well. But remember, you’ve to first get them excited about your product before they’re willing to share it out!
4. Let your users be peacocks: If folks love your product, give them something to brag about. The blue checkmark, the “Sent by __” footer are all ways to let your happy users show off that they’re part of the in-crowd.
Gaby Goldberg, who asked the question, had her own favorite answer.
She picked this great post about Superhuman, the email experience that everyone seems to love.
Superhuman is a great example of this done well for a product that is objectively boring.
1. Most users think the product works really well and is a better experience than Gmail.
2. Their 1:1 onboarding quickly teaches users how Superhuman is better. Importantly, it also allows them to collect feedback right off the bat and creates a personal relationship between the user and the company — that is super rare in a consumer product.
3. Finally, when users talk about how happy they are with Superhuman (or “Sent via Superhuman” is in their signature), they get to imply (without explicitly saying it) that “I’m busy enough to spend $30/month on email.”
Heard on Soufflé Club
Another winning take was about when exclusivity doesn’t make sense for your product launch.
But exclusivity doesn’t always make sense. Like in the case of souffle.club (since we’re talking about this on this platform). Since soufflé is meant to be a meritocracy where the best ideas rise to the top, it’s disingenuous to make this into an invite-only platform.
Heard on Soufflé Club
To catch the entire discussion, visit Soufflé Club.
There are new questions that the community debates every few days. You can check out what the hot topic in the community is today
Remember, on Souffle Club, the best answers are chosen entirely on the basis of the merit of the argument, not because of who the author is. So everyone starts on a level playing field with a fair chance to rise to the challenge!
