I wanted to share one of the bits of advice that I find myself most frequently giving to teams when they’re working on a product, or founders who are creating a new company: launch it three times.
What I mean by that is, it often takes more than one time before your idea actually resonates or sticks with the people you’re trying to reach. Sometimes it takes more than twice! And when I say that you might need to launch again, that can mean a lot of different things. It might just be little tweaks to what you originally put out in the world, It might even be less than that — I’ve worked with teams that put out literally the exact same thing again and found success, because the issue they had the first time was about timing. That’s increasingly an issue as people are distracted by the deeply disturbing social and political events going on in the world, and so sometimes they just need you to put things in front of them again so that they can reassess what you were trying to say.
Many relaunches are a little more ambitious, of course. Being a Prince fan, I am of course very partial to strategies that involve changing your name. Re-launching under a new name can be a key strategic move if you think that you’re not effectively reaching your target audience. As I’d written recently, one of the most important goals in getting a message out is that they have to be able to talk about you without you. But if you want people to tell your story even when you’re not around, the most important prerequisite is that they have to remember your name. With Glitch, that was the third name we actually launched the community under, a fact that I was a little bit embarrassed about at the time. But having a memorable name that resonated ended up being almost as much a factor in our early success as our user experience or the deeper technological innovations.
There are other ways of making changes for a successful re-launch. One thing I often suggest is to subtract things (or just de-emphasize them) and use that reduction in complexity to simplify a story. Or you can try to re-center your narrative on your users or community instead of on your product — the emotion and connection of seeing someone succeed often resonates far more than simply reciting a litany of features or technical capabilities. Any of these small iterations allow you to take another swing at putting something out into the world without having to make a massive change to the core offering.
Often times, people are afraid or embarrassed to make changes to things like branding or design because they’re some of the more visible aspects of a product or service. Instead, they retreat to “safe” areas, like tweaking the pricing or copy on a web page that nobody reads. But the vast majority of the time, the single biggest problem you have is that nobody knows you exist, and nobody gives a damn about what you do. Everything else pales in comparison to that. I’ve seen so many teams trying to figure out how to optimize the engagement of the three users on their app, or the five people who come to their site, while forgetting about the other eight billion people who have no idea they exist.
What about not failing?
This idea of launching again is really important to keep in mind because so much of the narrative in the startup world is about “fail fast” and “90% of startups fail”. When the conventional narrative from VCs prompts you to pivot right away, or an investor is pressuring everyone to grow, grow, grow at all costs, it can be hard to think about slowing down and taking the time to revisit and refine an idea.
But if you’re moving with conviction, and you’ve created something meaningful, and if you’re serving a real community that you have a deep understanding of, then it may be the case that you simply need to try again. If you are not moving with conviction to create something meaningful for a real community, then you don’t need to do it three times, because you don’t even need to do it once.
So many of the creators and innovators that inspire me most often end up working on their best ideas for years or even decades, iterating and revisiting those ideas with an almost-obsessive passion. Most of the time, they’re doing it because of a combination of their own personal mission and the deep belief that what they’re doing is going to help change people’s lives for the better. For those kinds of people, one of the things I want most is to ensure that they don’t give up before their ideas have had a full and fair chance to succeed, even if that means that sometimes you have to try, try again.
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