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Mar 11, 2024
Products fail because founders miss or simply ignore critical aspects of the launch process, whether it's gathering customer feedback or training their marketing and support team on the product.
This is why our product launch checklist is an essential part of the product development methodology. It ensures nothing is overlooked when you're bringing new products to market.
In this guide, we'll give you a 11-step checklist of everything you need to do to launch and deploy a successful software product.
In a nutshell, we'll split the entire product launch into three phases:
- Pre-launch
- Launch
- Post-launch
From here, we'll look at the most important tasks you need to do during each phase of the launch. These steps include conducting interviews with your target audience during pre-launch, setting up analytics to monitor user metrics during the launch, and setting up customer feedback to continuously improve your product after the launch.
However, we know it's impossible to cram everything you need to know about launching a product into a single article. Product managers spend their entire careers launching products and are still experimenting and trying to optimize their launch strategy. So most of your learnings will happen as you’re launching products, making mistakes, and learning from your mistakes.
Who are we: We are Dome, a PaaS that allows founders to launch their software product within minutes rather than weeks. Your product deploys fully scalable and all your data stays on the cloud. So if you’re interested in deploying a software product, sign up for a free Dome account. You don’t have to enter your credit card information!
Pre-launch
The pre-launch is by far the most time-consuming part of launching a software product. This is where all the preparation takes place to build a software product with product-market fit.
Step 1: Learn if there's actually a market for your product
Before you and your team begin coding, you want to understand if there's actually a market for the product you want to build and if your target audience is willing to pay for it.
The best way to do this is to look at all the companies selling products similar to what you want to sell. How much revenue are they generating? How many customers do they have? How much do they charge? Have they raised several rounds of funding?
If there are existing companies in your space generating at least a couple million dollars of revenue per year, and there are hundreds or thousands of customers paying to use their product, then there's a market for this product.
If you're venturing into a completely new space and no company has done what you're trying to do, you'll need to get more creative. You'll need to conduct video interviews with people who fit your target audience description and get an idea of if the product you're developing is solving a problem big enough that they are willing to pay for it.
Step 2: Identify weaknesses that your competitor's product has
When you know that there's a market for your product, conduct competitive analysis and try to find a couple of major flaws in your competitors’ products. The best way to do this is to hop on video calls with customers of these competitors and pick their brains on what the product lacks.
For example, if you're developing accounting software and all the existing products don't offer AI to help extract insights from financial data, you’d want to consider developing your accounting software with an AI feature.
This will become the unique value proposition that you use in your marketing copy as well as on sales calls when customers ask what sets you apart from the other products in the market.
Step 3: Build a clickable MVP that solves these problems
Once you have a list of the problems your competitors’ customers are facing, build a clickable MVP that solves these problems.
The goal here is to build an MVP and quickly release it into the market while spending as little money as possible. Customers haven't actually paid you for your product just yet, so you don't want to build expensive software with all the bells and whistles.
As long as your product solves the limitations that your competitors’ customers are facing, you can always focus on UX and integrations after the first round of customer feedback.
Step 4: Give your product away for free and understand what users think about it
Now, it's time to release your MVP into the market and get an idea of what customers think about it. An excellent way to do this without spending thousands of dollars on marketing is to send your product to the competitors’ customers you interviewed in step two.
You've already built rapport with these customers, and we found that most customers are more than willing to use your product and provide you with some feedback.
If you'd like to get feedback from even more users, you can cold email people who fit the criteria of your target audience and give them access to your product for free.
This initial feedback is what's going to fuel your product development efforts all the way to the launch phase.
Step 5: Decide on pricing
The final step before you deploy and launch your product is deciding on pricing. Coming up with a price for your product is a topic on its own, and we can probably write several articles on each pricing strategy.
However, we found that one of the best pricing strategies for software products is to charge users a monthly subscription similar to what your competitors are charging, maybe even a little less. We recommend this strategy because you already know that people are willing to pay this price for a product similar to yours. So, instead of creating your own pricing, use your competitors' pricing as a guide.
This also gives you an additional unique value proposition because you are solving all your competitors' limitations while offering your product at a lower price point.
When you have a larger customer base in the future, you can always increase the price for new customers.
Launch
The launch is all about deploying your product, training various teams inside your company on your product, and promoting your launch on social media.
Step 6: Know what makes your product unique
Once you've deployed your product, train your marketing team on its positioning, how it works, its differentiators, and how you want them to talk about it in articles and ads. If you don't have a marketing team or you're a soloprenuer, make sure you know all of those things like the back of your hand. You need to make sure you're communicating your value proposition and differentiators to your target audience in a persuasive and correct manner.
Too often, we see that companies don’t actually understand their product’s differentiators, important features, competitors, and value propositions. If you have marketers, make sure they know it as well as you do. Marketers are expected to understand the product by watching a couple of YouTube videos and reading articles about similar products.
This then creates a massive discrepancy between how the company website and marketing copy speaks about the product and what the product actually does, making it impossible for founders to communicate their product’s differentiators.
Step 7: Train your customer support and success team on your product
In addition to training your marketing team, you also want to train your customer support and success team on how to use your product and the common challenges customers face. So, when onboarding new customers, your customer support and success team can show them how to use your product to its full potential while addressing any problems that they encounter.
If you don't have a customer support team yet, give your users a way to get to you or your engineers building your product. Make sure you understand their problems, know how to address them, and you can improve your product!
Step 8: Promote your launch
Once you’ve deployed your product and trained your team on how to position it in marketing campaigns, it’s time to promote your launch on social media.
Up until now, you mainly reached out to customers of your competitors using cold email and it’s very possible that a lot of these customers might switch over to your solution because you solved all the flaws that their current solution has.
However, if you want to build your own base of paying customers, you’ll need to begin promoting your launch by posting on Facebook and other social channels, running ads to your website, and writing articles targeting keywords your target audience might be Googling.
Post-launch
The post-launch phase is all about tracking metrics inside your software product and interviewing customers to learn about where your product falls short, so you can use this feedback to fuel further development.
Step 9: Track and analyze your product's performance
Once you've successfully deployed and launched your product, use analytics tools to track your product's performance. This could include which features customers use most, which features aren't very popular, and how much time customers spend on certain sections of your application.
From here, you can make it easier to access features that your customers use all the time and remove features that aren't used much.
Step 10: Interview customers to understand where you can improve
Alongside tracking app analytics, conducting interviews with your customers and asking them questions is a great way to find weaknesses in your product and develop features to combat these weaknesses.
For example, if several customers asked you to introduce a plugin that connects your accounting software product to Zapier, you can have your development team build this feature and add it to the app. Or, if customers say the user interface is a bit cluttered, you could get your UX designer to develop a cleaner design.
Step 11: Implement customer feedback
Implementing customer feedback is a continuous step that occurs throughout the lifecycle of your product. You always need to be using the feedback you get from customers to power the development of your software product.
Deploy your software product with Dome
If you want to deploy your software product quickly and without going through a tedious deployment process, try Dome. You can launch a Dome SaaS template that comes with all of the services and integrations you need to start a SaaS company or connect it to a GitHub project to deploy on Dome.
