Launching Your Startup: 4KTA

Naveen Bisht

Board Member and Chair,
TiE Silicon Valley

3. Launch Strategy and Positioning – The main elements of your launch strategy are readiness of marketing assets, Media communication schedule, and launch date. The marketing assets include company overview, product data sheets, FAQs, white papers, customer use cases, press releases, Team Bio, company and product presentation slides, competitive landscape, any related industry articles or analyst white papers, company website and blog sections. The marketing team with PR firm will confirm communication schedule with media, analysts, and blogger community. For the launch date, a number of companies like to launch products during trade shows. My preference is to launch either before or after any major trade show. The reason being big companies dominate trade shows due to huge marketing budgets for big booths, lots of freebies, and parties. Hence, to rise above all this noise could be challenging. Instead, rent an inexpensive hospitality suite and invite your customers, prospects, analysts, and media folks to showcase your product demo. We used the similar strategy during Ukiah Software’s NetRoad FireWALL and TrafficWARE product launches. Now to launch your social media company, you develop your web service and invite few friends to test it. Hope they like it and if they do, they will invite their friends and hope someone in the blogging community may notice it and blog about it. You hope that this viral effect will turn into an exponential user growth. For positioning, it’s important to learn about the industry, the market and the players, market climate, user trends, technology innovation and even the economy that can affect how your startup does and the competitive threats and opportunities it may attract. So positioning is key and it needs to be crisp, clear and has to stand out.

4. Launch Communication and Continued Execution – Complete your interviews per your communication schedule, do a press release on launch date and make sure your website is updated with all the material, press release, product information and a news section to post any articles linking to the original articles that will appear in industry magazines, online blogs. This can help you create the buzz and get your cash register going. Review your launch strategy and tactics after few weeks to see how you did against what you had expected. If some tactics worked better, amplify them and invest more in those messages for improving results. Being in front of market is an on-going process. So submit your product and services for industry awards and tout it in your blog and issue press releases. We used similar strategy in Ukiah Software and received awards such as Top 10 companies to watch in 1999 by Network World and Top 25 Hot Startups of 1998 by Data Communications Magazine, 1999 and 1998 Hot Product Awards by Data Communications Magazine, 1999 Product of the Month Award by Telecommunications Magazine and Network World’s Blue Ribbon Award.

In summary, my four 4KTA points for launching your startup are Launch Plan, Launch Team, Launch Strategy and Positioning, and Launch Communication and Continued Execution.

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