The Biggest Mistake Companies Make in Launching a New Product

Why Your Product Development Cycle Is Backwards

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Your Product Development Cycle is Backwards

Most companies have the exact same product development cycle:

1 - Release the product.

2 - Build an audience (customer base) for the product.

3 - Build a community for the product (Only as a last resort if #2 doesn’t work).

This is completely backwards. You build the community first, then the audience, and the product comes last.

Here’s an example of why this flow works better. Let’s say you are an aspiring stand-up comic. Your thinking is that it’s best to build the product first (your comedy routine), then your audience next, and if we need a community, well we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

So you spend a year crafting the perfect comedy routine. Every night, you rehearse in front of a mirror. Rewriting when inspiration strikes, editing along the way. Finally after 12 months, you’ve got what you believe to be the perfect comedy routine.

You go to your local comedy club, get there at 5pm. You tell the owner you have a one-hour comedy routine, it’s hilarious, would he let you do it at his club?

The owner squints and looks at you, says normally he doesn’t take on new talent without a recommendation, but he’s had an act cancel tonight. So he tells you that he can give you 30 minutes, not 60, and you’re on in 2 hours. He says if the audience likes your act, he’ll talk to you about a long-term deal.

It’s 5pm, you’re on at 7pm. You’re already having to adjust your product for market fit (cutting it in half). So you run to a nearby print shop and print up 100 flyers for your appearance tonight. You get the flyers, and head back to the comedy club, and you get there an hour before you go on.

So you have your product (your comedy act), now you are trying to get an audience. You tell people that you will be performing tonight, and hand out your flyers.

The set starts, and on the fly, you try to cut your act down from 60 mins to 30. In your mind, you figure start the act, and if the audience isn’t responding to a joke, just cut it off and go to the next one. If they respond, tell the whole joke.

As you might guess, your set is a disaster. The audience hates your comedy routine, and what’s really irritating is most of the spots that you thought were hilarious, the audience either didn’t respond to, or they actually booed!

Why did your comedy routine fail? It could simply be because you just aren’t that funny. But for the purposes of this article, let’s assume you could have created a funny comedy routine, you just missed the mark due to not developing it properly.

Instead of adopting the Product > Audience > Community flow, let’s say you had built a community first, and the product last.

You start by building a community. At first, you are simply telling jokes to your friends and family. You gauge their responses, and adjust the telling of the jokes accordingly. The jokes that aren’t getting many laughs, dump em. The jokes that everyone likes…those you focus on.

Over time, you hit on say 10 jokes that your friends and family (community), really love. You build stories around those jokes. Your friends and family (community) organically tell their friends and family about you and your hilarious jokes.

This leads to you building an audience. Pretty soon, everyone has heard how funny you are. People at your workplace will start randomly coming up to you and saying “Hey, tell us the joke about…”

Finally, after a year of connecting with your friends and family (community) and building interest organically (an audience), you approach the owner of the local comedy club about performing there. He says sure, you’ll go on in a week, and you’ll have a 30-minute set. If you do well, he’ll talk about having you perform there long-term.

Over the next week, you pick your 6 funniest jokes, and create a 30-minute set. You then contact your community (friends and family) and tell them to come, and bring their friends.

You perform your set, and it’s a smash hit. The audience is predominantly made up of people who already know you, love you, and think your jokes are hilarious. Your set only includes jokes that you know that this audience will enjoy, because they’ve responded to them over the last year.

Have you heard of Nate Bargatze? He’s probably the funniest, and most successful stand-up comic in America right now:

The thing about those jokes is it took him years to craft them. He did the same thing as the example above: First he ran them by friends and family (community), then performed the winners for his audience, then adjusted the set based on audience feedback. Lather, rinse and repeat for years, and over time the set almost has to get better.

As funny as Nate is, if he had never performed these jokes publicly in his life, and just debuted as a stand-up comic tomorrow night, his set wouldn’t be nearly as funny as it is now.

Why Community Needs to Come First

I just saw a video from Mark Zuckerberg explaining how to launch a new product. His steps (4) were:

1 - Launch the product

2 - Build in retention

3 - Build a community

4 - Monetize the product

Why is it so important that community comes first? Because the community is necessary to provide input into the development of the product. Too many companies let their egos tell them that they know what the customer wants better than the customer does.

I’m sorry, but most of us are NOT Steve Jobs. He often knew what the customer would want before they did. The rest of us need to actually listen to customers.

Another key advantage to building a community first is this: A community will become invested in the product’s development. As the community becomes more invested in a product, they give better feedback on the product. They do a better job of organically growing an audience for the product.

Build the community first. Then give the community input into the product’s design and development. As the community is heard and buys into the potential of the product, it will promote it to others. The company and the community WORK TOGETHER to refine the product. As the product is being refined (based on community feedback), the audience starts to grow.

Ideally, the audience and the product will grow together. So that, by the time the product has been refined to a point where it is ready to be launched, the audience is just waiting on it. Here, take my money!

But if you create and launch the product and THEN try to build an audience for it, the audience will have to no interest in it. The audience will have no attachment to the product, it wont have all the features or benefits the audience wants or needs.

Building a Solid Community to Support Your Product is More Important Than the Product Itself

Simply because the community will co-create the product with you. Rock stars have been doing this for years. They create an online platform for their fans, then track their data and then use it, along with direct feedback, to plan tours and merch.

In 2010, Emily Weiss was an editorial assistant at Vogue when she decided to take on a side hustle. She launched a beauty and fashion blog called Into the Gloss.

Weiss wanted to set Into the Gloss apart from other sources in the beauty space by creating an online space where customers felt empowered to share their views about beauty trends and products. Weiss would feature women sharing their views on products and trends, with the idea being that customers should be creating and shaping beauty trends moreso than brands and influencers.

Weiss’ focus on community-building was a huge success. By 2012, the blog was getting almost 5 million pageviews a month, and Weiss started hiring a team to help her manage her growing beauty content empire. As the blog grew, the community turned into a massive audience, and that meant Weiss could secure bigger partnerships with bigger sources in the beauty space.

By 2014, Weiss had not only grown Into the Gloss into a massive content hub, but she had also built a pretty impressive community of fans and a rabid audience for her content.

As a result, Weiss had 4 years of interactions with this community, so she had a pretty good idea of what beauty products they wanted.

So in 2014, she did the only sensible thing: She launched her own beauty company, Glossier. Then she created the products that her community said they wanted, and sold them to her audience.

By 2018, Glossier was a $400 Million dollar business, and its current annual sales are thought to be in the $275-300 Million range. Not bad for what started as a beauty blog.

You Can, and Should Be Doing the Same Thing on Substack

You can follow this same formula for growing here on Substack:

1 - Start by building a community of engaged readers. Interact, interact, interact. Over time, you will get a core group of supporters who will engage with your posts, who will restack and promote you to everyone else on Substack.

2 - Over time, that community will push your content out to the larger Substack community. This will help you grow your community into an audience.

3 - As your audience begins to grow, talk to your readers and ask them what products they need. Use their feedback to create and sell to them the very products they ask for.

Lather, rinse, repeat. But note this all starts by flipping the product launch cycle and building your community first, not last.

Have a great weekend!

Mack

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Backstage Pass teaches you how to better connect with your customers, readers, clients, or donors. The lessons shared here draw on my experience over the last 20 years building customer engagement strategies for companies like Adobe, Dell, Club Med, Ingersoll-Rand, and countless others. I give you real-world research, examples and tactics that show you how to create customer engagement efforts that drive real business growth.