unknown unknowns Archives ~ Launch Tomorrow

Let’s talk about risk

December 18, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Earlier this week, I was on the Yeukai Business Show talking about risk management in the context of startups. Yeukai was a great discussion partner, and pulled a lot of stories out of me. This is probably the more “storified” version of my work on risk management and experiments. As someone who spent 15+ years in financial markets and now almost 10 on innovation, I wanted to share the key learnings.

So if you want to learn how the foundations of identifying your biggest risks and being able to predict profitability and increase your confidence levels, pop over there and have a listen.

You'll discover:

The process of mitigating risk and cutting losses
The common reasons for loss and bankruptcy among tech startups
The impact of proper risk management, as well as 3 different ways to mitigate risk

If you want to find out more, check out Your First Startup Experiment to get even more tools and techniques on this topic.

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Here’s an example of an Extreme Product Launch

November 26, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Extreme product launches are focused on getting you to that first sale as quickly as possible. By figuring out what works on a business level, you can then proceed to with the business growth because you’re already proven that a business case exists (at a small scale) for your product.

This type of proof is much more powerful than any business plan you could write. In most types of business, making your first sale is the one thing you can do to make everything else easier or unnecessary.

Originally, I released Launch Tomorrow as an “extreme product launch” myself, by pre-testing the interest in a book on this topic.

It got great initial reviews, like:

“In my corporate consulting days [with McKinsey & Co], I used to tell my clients market research is a waste of time, because projects usually took 3 months and required a budget of $50-150K. But this stuff really changes the equation!” –Robert Grossman, Marketing Expert, Former Managing Partner, McKinsey & Co.

“I really liked the fact that you with your strategy a person can evaluate if a business idea is worth pursuing for just a few hundred dollars, rather than risk $25,000 and most likely fail.” –Scott Dudley, Direct Response Copywriter

Now it’s in prime time. It’s about using landing pages as minimum viable products. Clarify your value proposition. Validate that your customers will pay, before you start building a product.

If you’ve enjoyed this content so far, I know you’ll love Launch Tomorrow. You can pick up a copy of Launch Tomorrow over here.

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The Secret to a Successful Extreme Product Launch

November 20, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

If you could only do one thing before you launch, what would it be? I know what I would do.

It's simple. It takes a few hours tops, to make it worthwhile. It's inexpensive, affordable even for a threadbare entrepreneur.

Senior caucasian man holding blank empty banner covering mouth with hand, shocked and afraid for mistake. surprised expression — Photographer: krakenimages | Source: Unsplash

This is what it'll give you:

You easily create a product or service which actually appeals to your chosen prospects.
You describe it in language which resonates with your audience.
You prevent wasting time on counterproductive work (which you can't know about without actually doing this first), both in your business processes and in any software you might build.
You make it much easier for people to buy what they already want (cha ching!)
Your customers immediately understand your product, which means they're more likely to buy it, get excited, and promote it afterwards
Your product's good reputation explodes naturally
You keep your whole team aligned around the customers' needs

What is it?

Photographer: Mimi Thian | Source: Unsplash

Talk to your prospects. Intentionally don't sell them. Just learn about how they buy. How they live. What they need. That's it.

People like to buy, they hate being sold to. If you can engineer your whole sales and marketing process so that it's pleasant, engaging, and persuasive, you will have all of the above. You just need to ask. At the right time. In the right way.

Oh yeah, you'll also have a sales process that scales rapidly.

Seems like a big gain for so little work. High impact. Low effort.

Which reminds me…

There's a whole chapter going deep into exactly how to do this in Launch Tomorrow. What questions to ask…what order to ask them in…what to listen for…and most importantly how to find people to interview.

Grab your copy, and get crackin'.

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How Many Experiments Do I Need To Run?

September 18, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

A teacher said to her student, “Billy, if both of your parents were born in 1967, how old are they now?”
After a few moments, Billy answered, “It depends.”
“It depends on what?” she asked.
“It depends on whether you ask my father or my mother.”

It’s also like that with the number of experiments you need to run, in order to build a new product.

It depends.

On how much of a breakthrough you want your product to be.

Photographer: Rafael Pol | Source: Unsplash

Soviet inventor Genrich Altschuller created the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving”, or TIPS. In the original Russian, it’s called TRIZ. TRIZ’s a massive topic in its own right, providing a systematic methodology for solving problems creatively.

Apparently even creativity can be systematized.

Anyway.

While Altschuller reads quite heavily in the translated English version, he shares nuggets of wisdom–which are very relevant for product entrepreneurs.

For example, he pored over about 40,000 patent filings, mining for insight and inspiration. It turned out, that there were clear patterns in how inventors approached problem solving. Depending on the type of challenge being addressed, the number of experiments the inventors did made the technological breakthrough even greater.

This shows exactly what’s required if you want to create a breakthrough product. Most commercialized products which are “revolutionary” will require at least 10,000 well-thought out experiments.

You don’t know which of your experiments will reveal insight. If you aren’t doing thousands of them, then you ain’t gettin’ none.

The takeaway here is clear. Everyone wants quick results. Sometimes they do happen. (I’m all for being optimistic.)

More often than not, though, you’ve got a lot of experiments to run. Systematically. In order to really get beyond conventional wisdom. If you want to discover a counter-intuitive truth. So get started already!

Taking this into the Lean Startup realm, before you even start your technical experiments like Altschuller, you can run marketing experiments.

Figure out what your market wants. What problems they have. What keeps them up at night.

Then, when you put your product creator hat on, you’ll make a product which has a chance at commercial success. That’s the bit the Soviets missed.

If you want to find out more about how to run these types of marketing experiments, I’ve got your back. My upcoming book Your First Startup Experiment goes into a lot more detail.

Read it.

Apply it.

Profit from it.

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Why the Launch Tomorrow process actually works

September 11, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Recently I showed up on the Predictable B2B Success podcast. Vinay interviewed me. He originally worked with Dan Norris as his content guy, and is now running a content repurposing agency.

To be honest, Vinay did a great job pushing me for details with a healthy skepticism to what I was saying. This dynamic turned or conversation into a good interview, highlighting on the ins and outs of the Launch Tomorrow method as it now stands. And also how it's different from both Lean Startup and online direct marketing, when looking at growth.