Launch Party

VO: Get ready for your semi-regular dose of random ideas from the guys at code elation. 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 Eric 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: and I'm Erick. And today's idea is celebrating. And I rarely forget to celebrate outside of work, but at work or, you know, with our customers is kind of a little different story. So a little backstory to this is we've always kind of just quietly made software and websites and kind of have like a craftsman culture where we just finished something. And he'd just pick up the hammer and start going to go into town. The next thing it's like very black Smithy kind of way of working. So within the last few months, we kind of talked about, you know, as a company, even just stopping and celebrating and reflecting on how far we've come.

Josh: You know, I think we did a good job at our all team meeting of, you know, starting to celebrate. I think there are some, some points there that we hadn't done before, but we still have a long ways to go. You know, we've got team members that are getting married. People are moving to new cities, we have clients launching thing. You know, I think the list just kind of goes on and on happy wedding this weekend, Cody

Erick: Now all the internet knows that, but that's, so we kind of wanted to take that celebration to beyond that amazing wedding celebration we just had for Cody was we want to take that to some of the products that we made. And one of the big things we stress, you know, well, before we even start building anything, is we really want to find your first actual paying customers. You know, as a marketing team, we kind of want to shift our work to help our customers find their customers were just kind of confusing.

Josh: You know, I don't know many other companies, Erick, that really helped their customers celebrate a launch, you know, especially in the development space, um, or really at our size or scale. Um, our friends at tellwell do a great job, a few others do as well at really celebrating the success of a launch or completion of a video. Um, so I do think we need to step our game up,

: You know, and that fast forward to today, I maybe shouldn't have told this to our whole team during team building week, but we're in the process of finishing up a product now and our project manager. Cody's like, you know, uh, we're going to help you take your market or your product to market. So here's Eric and he does our marketing done. I'm going to go back to managing the software building. Here you go.

Josh: That's sounds about right. Yeah. I, you know, I, I liked the idea of celebrating a launch. It's so easy to be focused on the next thing, instead of taking a moment to pause and say this, this is a big feat, this has taken our team, your team a lot of time and energy to, to this point. So, um, I, it's cool to celebrate the launch, your first co customer, you know, those clients that have been able to outgrow us as a team. I think all of these milestones are amazing to witness as you know, us having a small role in our customer success.

Erick: So yeah, here we go. I'm going to throw a birthday party for an app and say, and I even in like the building process, you know, it's really easy to get lost in the whole, I'm not ready or this isn't perfect and it has to be perfect. A business's kind of like a baby and it's not going to be perfect or polished for a while if even ever. And so you should celebrate StepStone. So in the middle of COVID, we decided to learn on the fly, how to host a webinar. And so PS thank you to our copywriter slash marketing consultant, Lana for putting some actionable steps to this launch party idea. So what are these actionable steps? Well, we have some things, but we're really lucky. This is kind of an interesting different product that they already have a lot of potential interested buyers, users of their platform already. They have an email drip campaign set up and they're actually partnered with other good people in their field that has a larger, larger audience of their target demographics. So the plan for us is just to produce a few like of video series showing the evolution of the idea, the need for a solution, kind of do a product walkthrough and we'll tease kind of the different aspects of the women are through some targeted emails and messaging kind of leading up to the event. Then we'll go on there to do our first webinar, which is kind of we'll get that going. And then hopefully that's a success and we can tweak it and make it a little bit better and take it to the partner who has a bigger audience. So yeah, that's kind of the plan.

Josh: I think the takeaway from that is that it's not just about building the product, it's about getting in front of your audience and making sure that you have enough people that are interested in your product before you, you know, before you launch.

Erick: Well, before you even start paying us to build it.

Josh: Yeah. And you know, I think what you talked about is something that really aligns us in our, our partners, AKA or customers to be working together. You know, the phrase that I like to use in something like this is that we're highly, highly aligned, but loosely coupled we're all going to the same place. Uh, probably just a little bit,

Erick: A little different place, but yeah, no, and I honestly like I've wanted to do this since, since I started for us and our window to turn this around is a little, it's a little quicker than unlike, but I'm kinda more of a ready fire aim person anyway. So figuring out this is just going to be, that's what I want to do. And we'll probably have to do a little followup to see how my ready fire aim worked in some future episodes.

Erick: You know, I think we'll learn a lot about just doing it once and improving from there. Otherwise I don't think that we would ultimately, you know, start something. So, so thanks for listening. If you know a startup that could have us plan their launch party, contact us at correlation.com.