Ask HN: Is there a “product launch as a service” company?

Lots of digital agencies do this for you, but splashy agency launches aren't usually how startups get off the ground (with a few exceptions). They're how bigger companies release new products because they have ample brand awareness and budget.

The conventional wisdom in the last ten years for new startup products are that you should open discussions with initial customers yourself.

This kind of early customer development lets you prove your hypotheses around the product having demand before investing in expensive promotional spending.

Customer acquisition should absolutely only be done by the founder in the beginning. This is the most important part of your fledgling business and one you cannot afford to outsource.

We just launched our SaaS service for bloggers last week (after 9 long months of work). After seeking an answer to this question myself in the past, I think I've learned enough to partially answer this question.

Here's a few takeaways:

1. Definitely prepare for launch DURING development, and ideally start on day 1 (or ASAP). Set up a pre-launch page and explain your upcoming product. Collect as many emails as you can. This gives you ample time to ensure that you don't launch to crickets when the big day comes.

2. If you are not famous or well known, it will be 10-100x harder to gain traction, but not impossible. Luck also plays a bigger part if you are unknown and/or have little to no connections.

3. No one will understand your product/service better than you. You need to outline all the benefits your service provides via blogging, landing page, explainer video, etc. We hired a video creation company to create our explainer video, but ended up re-writing the script ourselves and basically produced the whole video (other than the graphics, music, and voiceover).

4. You can hire a PR company, but they are very limited on what they can do especially if working with a limited budget. In this case you still need to give them interesting things to write about, since like I stated above, no one will understand your product/service and its benefits better than you. PR results OBVIOUSLY can be hit or miss and don't guarantee any results.

5. Long-term growth is usually a fairly standard procedure, and most successful companies follow a similar common formula. Have a blog and regularly post blog posts that would interest your potential market. In our case it's bloggers, so our blog will contains posts that bloggers find interesting. Blog content also drastically improves SEO. You can use your arsenal of blog posts and share them when the time is right/relevant (on Quora, Reddit, HN, Linkedin, etc). Over time, organic word-of-mouth growth kicks in (along with compound growth), but until then, you have to do things yourself. Remember: a bunch of little wins = Success. Finding these little wins is hard and time consuming and no one will likely do it for you, especially in the beginning.

To answer your question, I think there's just too many moving parts to outsource all of it to a "growth/traction company" but doing it yourself is very possible as long as you put legitimate time and effort into it.

If you're curious about what service we launched, it's at http://blogenhancement.com

There's quite a few but it depends on your product. I've done over 30+ product launches and gained about 25M users in total as an outside consultant working with companies to help them do launches.

The questions that always help me suggest the best tools are as follows:

* Have money to spend or not?

* B2C or B2B

* Age Segment targetting

* Trigger Frequency of potential customer

* # of players in the space

* Have you been through 4 product iterations or are you trying to have a big splash without a designated purpose?

* Do you have your own email list?

If you can answer some of these questions, I can recommend the best tools and if you have any questions about tooling/analytics, I can point you in the right direction and tell you where I've failed in product launches as well.

That's what PR agencies do. It's not cheap, but it's certainly available.

You've described a marketing agency.

Whether or not a startup can justify the expense is really between you and your investors because it will likely be a very significant outlay. There's a reason most people DIY as much as they can.

I think pretty much every "social media" (ugh) company will do that for you

I believe this is called an event planner?

There are, however, I think people worry too much about launching. It helps for a short period of time, but then people move on to tomorrow's product hunt submissions.

What's more important is nailing a distribution strategy. Focusing and executing on distribution is difference between Airbnb and everyone else.

Source - https://growthhackers.com/growth-studies/airbnb

Not generally a good idea, but please post a link to the product to get more specific feedback. A product is not a business yet. Before you sink money into a launch you'd want to go from "I think I have a good product" to "I know I have a good product" (some people refer to this as product-market fit).

I run a company that among other things, works with mid to early stage startups (as in, some folks with an idea). We help them build the product (design, development), launch it and do marketing. My email is in my profile if you have any questions, etc.

I recommend nailing down exactly what you think an MVP should look like and iterating on early customer feedback.

It's important to stress that we are there to help startups augment their teams at later stages, but by no means can we replace the culture and passion of a dedicated team working night and day to make your dreams come true. We can build you something fantastic, help you grow a user base, but at the end of the day the road to most effective profitability and vision is in the hands of the founder.

Reach out to Benjamin Bryant (https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhbryant). He was behind Pebble’s launch campaigns on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/2nFRA4a).

My company does this (although I never thought to refer to it as a "PLaaS" company). While most services out there focus on promotion, launch plan, sales automation, advertising, etc. I find those activities to be mostly about execution. Most startups struggle much sooner than that, with strategy. They struggle in the planning and validation of the product idea and the business model itself. Basically, they shortcut this stuff (often because they love their idea and are already convinced the world wants it). Then they find out after launch how real the real world can be. In reality, there is a ton of work to do way before any of the tactical "go to market" stuff can happen. You have to have an impeccably clear understanding of your value prop, your audience, and your sustainable differentiation. After all, if you don't have a sustainably unique idea that clearly adds value to a well defined audience, you don't need to launch or market your idea. Instead, you need to go back to the drawing board and identify your core value creation more clearly. Also, you need to have a well vetted, living business plan that does more than simply document your intentions. For new business/product/service ideas, we use a proprietary business planning system that focuses on risk management, among other things. As part of the process, we help entrepreneurs understand their customers really well. From there we can build the business around delivering value to them. Any respectable entrepreneur should be busting their a$$ day and night to get their business going, but that doesn't mean they have to do it all themselves. It simply means they have to find a way to get it all done and they have to understand it all. No business gets off the ground by one person working in a silo. So I have respectfully disagree with he comments that the founder must do this work. I strongly believe that founders, just like everyone else, have certain strengths and weakness and the most successful ones find a way to get help in areas where they are not so strong.

I do that. Shoot me an email. Ill try and answer any questions you may have. No bs or strings.

Products are things that help people accomplish something. Without initial customers, how do you know you've built something that people need?

Have you tested it with users? If so, and they haven't paid you money for it, why not?

It's not a good product if no one uses it.

You're basically asking if you can outsource your startup. I'm sure you've heard that in startups, the idea is worthless, it's all about execution. Execution is mostly what you just called "product launch." It's figuring out how to cost-effectively acquire and retain your customers, assuming you got product/market fit right on the first attempt. (hint: you didn't)

I'm sure there are agencies that would gladly take your money to do the things you listed, but they won't produce a working business model.

Rather than thinking of it as the product launch, you should think of it as your first experiment to test product/market fit.

There is one problem with this service offering (and it isn't insurmountable). Put yourself in the position of a founder who just spent the last 12-18+ months building your startup. Would you then be willing to hand over the reigns to someone else or to some firm to do the launching for you? Especially when the launch is pretty much the one and only chance the company has to get off the ground? Outsourcing really only makes sense when you can transfer the risk in a way that mitigates it. Here it feels like you would be increasing risk of failure if for no other reason that the launch firm has less to lose if you fail than you would.

I've tried starting something like this a couple of times, but want to do it full time someday. I would focus on the web building side of things, but would need someone with more charisma to do the promotional side. Regardless, I haven't really sunk the time needed or capital, which doesn't really hold well when trying to start a company :P Maybe some day.

As far as branding goes, tailorbrands[1] does an excellent job at getting a professional image setup. As others have mentioned there are still large areas that could use help with business dynamics and goals.

[1] https://www.tailorbrands.com (Not affiliated, just impressed with their offering)

Gigster offers ad-hoc engineering teams that can help you launch, promote and scale. Some of their engineers are employed at social media companies and would undoubtedly prove useful for what you're trying to do. https://gigs.to/r/zdBxq5F

We do that with my agence Mozza (mozza.io) but it doesn't work if you do nothing in the meantime. You can deleguate a part of your work and get guidance, but ultimately you can't replace the effort you and your team will put in building the right product by understand your users.

http://producthunt.com is how a lot of startups do it nowadays, and reporters are usually in there looking—so if it's interesting it may also get pickup.

I'd say http://www.growthgeeks.com/ is my favorite source for this. They have lots of different people that can help you out.

If it is a B2C product launch, you have Retail as a Service : Airflash, which gives you access to Early Customers,Bloggers,Connects to Wholesale Distributors and Retail Access through popup stores

www.airflash.co

I've heard https://startuplister.com/ is pretty good bang for the buck.

sounds like you should do your research. All depends on what EXACTLY you want and how much your willing to spend... If someone did that theyd want money for it.

There is this:

http://launchrock.com

Lest the HN bots think I am over selling my startup,

Check out www.crowdraising.co