"Go Live" event?
What would you recommend a B2B startup do for a go-live event? We've been in open beta for the last 2 months and January, if all goes well, is our planned "Live" month. What would be the things to do? How does one "go live"?
Obviously, we're planning to send out our newsletter to our subscribers, post on industry forums, and perhaps utilize PRWEB.com. Anything else needs to be done?
Thanks for your suggestions
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You gotta have the champagne, strippers, and whatever else you want to reward yourself with. Im not joking, a key thing to keep yourself motivated is to share your milestone with those who treasure your accomplishment, and if they cannot be found, by spoiling yourself with a gift. Doesnt really answer your question, but an important thing to consider. – Frank 14 years ago
2 Answers
that's my checklist (I copied and adapted from my original blog post here )
Preparation (at least 3 weeks before)
- Screencast : creating a screencast of a new product/functionality is the most effective and cheap way to promote it. You can use Screenflow or Camtasia for screencast and Audacity for audio recording
- create the PR : the old dry and boring PR. If you launch in conjunction with a big company, you’ll need to send them the PR in advance to get their approval. It can take one week, so plan in advance.
- create the blog post : a more informal, personal blog post to present the new product/feature to your readers
- create the landing page : that’s a 1-page explanation of the product or feature. PR, blog post and (optionally) advertisement will point to this page
- create a help/tutorial site (if applicable) : a more detailed explanation of the new product or feature
- prepare the list of bloggers/industry analysts/influential people to notify… you’ll use the list later
- Prepare the blog and website, saving the pages as draft
- Setup analytics (Google Analytics and Kissmetrics are my favorite right now). In particular, you want to learn which channel work better (who many users come from Twitter? How many from Facebook? how many from the NYT blog?... )
- Reach the list of bloggers/influential people and inform them of the launch, specifying the release date
- Publish all the web pages (PR, blog, landing pages, tutorials, screencast)
- Post links to Twitter, facebook, Linkedin (and ask people to retweet!)
- Notify your customers via email of the new product/functionality
Instead of spending a lot of time and effort on launching on a particular date, you could just put the effort into growing your business. Unless you have a really great story to tell, you are unlikely to get a lot of PR anyway. You might as well spend the effort on marketing to your customers directly.
If you do want to have a 'launch' then Filippo's answer has a great list.
