Launch Party Pt. 2

VO: Get ready for your semi-regular dose of random ideas from the guys at Codelation. We like to talk about big ideas companies that are winning, and those that aren't along with current events in our crazy world of software startups. So come along with Erick and Josh, who challenge you to think big, start small and turn your ideas into something on this episode of, from idea to done.

Josh: Hey everyone, I'm Josh,

Erick: I'm Erick and today's idea is bringing a happy birthday to my ideal tracker. And this is actually a followup to our last episode, talking about, you know, launching a product. And so here we go this week, Dr. John he'd launched my ideal tracker and our whole team actually worked on this, which is awesome because it's the first time all three of our kind of previously siloed teams worked on a aspect of this project and brought it to launch. And it, and I'm really just overall happy with this trial by fire kind of ended up being awesome. And there were a few bumps along the way, and there's plenty to learn from, but at the end of the day, Dr. John hosted his launch webinar and he sent it to send this webinar to a very specific list of potential customers. We helped Polish the app's landing page. We wrote the email campaign to get people to get there. And we did a walkthrough video of the app that he played during his presentation. I just thought it went really well. Josh, what were your thoughts on the first launch?

Josh: Well, I'll start with just saying that John was like really, really excited about the work that went into it, um, from our seat. I think it's a great thing for us to lean into as a unique value proposition for our customers. And it's something I don't see a lot of agencies doing, you know,

Erick: And it doesn't take too much to get me excited about anything, but I honestly think this project was kind of a game changer for us just to kind of fall back on what we ask. A lot of our customers is like, what does your app do that differentiates yourself from other products or other things in that field. And I've not run into any other development companies that want to bring to help their customers market their product, to find their actual first customers. Josh, what do you kind of think that the launch party did to differentiate us?

Josh: I think it's, you know, launching a product that you're expecting to grow revenues off of is definitely different than, you know, stepping in from other marketing aspects of scheduling a blog post or creating a content schedule. I mean, that's, there's values to those tasks as well. Um, but I think, um, uh, a main reason that other companies don't lean into that is there's risk involved. Like it's now on our shoulders to some extent, to make sure that, you know, if we're helping to validate the market, that it's the right market to be talking to. And if we're, you know, taking it in into launch and we, we don't position it, right? Like, is there a risk there for us as a company? You know, I, I think so. Um, but you know, as we've grown as a company, we've been able to help with just so much more than the development and I, that's a risk I'm willing to bet on,

Erick: You know, and it's kind of like the Thelma and Louise when they like hold each other's hand as they drive off the cliff. I think helping with marketing is something we've, we've talked to a lot of other companies already on some of our app builds. I, I think we kind of ran into similar problems that our dev teams running into when doing this project, it's kind of similar to an app build. We had to shift gears a couple of times and the plans kind of change in that wasted some of our time and some of our money, other people got involved in planning and magically changes happen along the way. And, and again, it's just, it's really similar to when you're building the app and we run into things that you don't think about from a customer standpoint, I think to make this process better, we're going to need some better communication kind of across all of the teams and during the process, we had to get some kind of better flow to it. And I think that's something that we can improve upon for next time. What are some of the things you think that we could do smoother on our next, you know, all team project?

Josh: Well, I think no matter who you are as a company or a married couple or anything, like communication's the key of it, and that's a never ending process. Like you're always going to need to improve communication, um, as you evolve and grow. So for me, it, it, it really goes back to, you know, standardizing processes and document that as a living system, you know, by doing that, we now have a way of doing things that it only, you know, that process only changes by somebody saying we're going to change the process versus well, let's handle it this way, this time. And then you look up after the fact and go, well, it didn't go smoothly because we tried something new. Like, I think that's a pretty universal statement that a lot of people can, can understand. Um, you know, plus we've been using a really great tool called parallax. Um, and Tom from the parallax, product's been on the podcast before. So shout out to Tom and Dave, it's really helping us understand like where our capacity is and how much time do we have to get the project work done that we need to.

Erick: And I like that it combines all of our teams and that's really what we're trying to do. And me as a sales person, as a marketer, I can see where the schedule is at instead of it being in a spreadsheet in Cody's desk, that's kind of where some of that stuff has lived before. So as we help John with his launch, I think we need to do a little bit more as a team to celebrate that too. I think I'm going to make everyone download the among us app. And then we're going to take a little, you know, happy hour trying to figure out which one of us is a murderer. Did you have any, any kind of thoughts on internal celebration and kind of stopping to appreciate where you are and maybe some different ideas on how to celebrate

Josh: You do a much better job about celebrating the wins than I do. I'm much more of a Welp. We've done it now onto the next. So I do think some sort of a internal congrats needs to happen. And even with that, you know, video games and chicken wings, like making sure we're taking the time to pause and, um, you know, just say, Hey, we, we caught one up out the door. How, how great is that for, for John or other clients that we're working with?

Erick: And the part that I liked about it about this particular launch too, was he was so happy with that. And everyone got to see that cause he stopped. Well, all of the people in office got to see it, but I did say it over slack that he was super happy. And so I think we do, we have that, you know, blacksmith done with one sword next kind of culture and celebration is important. John needs to celebrate taking his idea, his good idea, and turning it into an actual software and getting farther than 99% of other good ideas. And I'm really excited to be able to bring this different approach to customers in the future. Josh, did you have any final thoughts?

Josh: You know, I'm just, I'm, I'm really looking forward to saying we've built the thing. We've celebrated it now, how quick can he take that idea into his first paying customer? Then it's a hundred paying customer and 500 paying customer. Like what's the impact that, that, that gives for, for our clients. That's just,

Erick: And I, I wanted to reach out to him yesterday and be like, oh, how'd the thing go, but I've been scared to yet. So yeah. So happy birthday. My ideal tracker, thank you for listening. We're hoping, you know, a startup that could use our advice or random thoughts, send them over to correlation.com to hear our next podcast.