9 Tips to Build and Launch a Product Successfully

Your product is the most significant part of your brand. When people try your product, they form an opinion about it and associate it with your company. So be it your first or ninth product, you need to ensure that your customers are completely satisfied with what it does.

For startups, in particular, it is even more challenging because of the uncertainty of how long you are going to stay in the market. The potential customers, in this case, are afraid that their time and money will be wasted if you just disappear from the market. 

Putting the fear aside, there is no shortage of startups that built a product and made millions out of it very soon. What these startups did is something you should note before you start developing a product.

There are a lot of sources that you can use as inspiration, but it is not only the idea of the product that matters. It’s about how you move forward and take care of the execution part. The execution part does not end once you’ve finished developing the product either. In fact, it continues even after that. 

Launching the product correctly is also as important as developing a product. Why? It’s because if your launch fails and you’re not able to generate the required sales to keep your business running,  then it doesn’t matter how good your product is.

So here, we have identified two of the major factors that determine if your business is going to be successful. These are the proper development of the product and the effective launch, which takes place after the development. This article consists of some tips on both these factors to bring the best out of your potential. Let’s begin.

Tips to Build a Product Successfully

If you are in a technical industry, you must have experienced the constant urge to perfect the project before handing it over to the customer. This is a great thought for your customers, but the problem with this is that you can run out of money without catering to the actual needs of the customers. This is where tons of companies go wrong.

Your customers can’t wait a lifetime for you to give them what you’re building. Here are some of the crucial ways to keep things on track for making a triumphant product.

Discover the Unmet Need Of Customers

Irrespective of how much growth we see in the industry, customers always want something better – something that they have not got yet. If you are starting out in the industry, these unmet needs can give you a product idea or feature that can almost ensure that your product will be a success.

In order to know what the unmet needs are, you can create some questions to interview your customers, whether existing or potential. You have to ensure that your questions tell you what the problem of your customers is. 

More importantly, you need to carefully listen to what they say. By listening to their answers, you’ll get to know more about the nature of their pain, which will allow you to come up with a product that a customer cannot deny purchasing.

Develop Hypothesis

Now you have made some observations about what your customer’s actual needs are and you know how to align yourself with them. The next step is to make intelligent guesses about the features that you could add to the product to make it accepted on a worldwide level. Moreover, you should work on figuring out what’s the estimated number of users that would use the prototype with those features. When you know what the average customer adoption number is going to be, you get to decide how much you should actually invest in the product.

Define Your Product

Since you have already interviewed people to find out their unmet needs, you have a clear picture of who your target audience is and what it is that they want. Now you just have to give them a reason to choose your product over the others available on the market.

Here you should take tips from successful brands about how they define their product and values, and integrate them into the entire company. Sales, marketing, finance, public relations, and offers – everything works around how you’ve defined your product. You have to dig deeper to find out what your company offers that no one else does. At the same time, you have to emphasize the qualities that make your product effective.

When defining your product, associate it with a story so that the customer can emotionally connect with it.

Prototype the Solution

Now you know what the features that your product can have are, it’s time to move to the next step, and start building a quick prototype with those features. The first version is not meant to completely satisfy the customer; it is more for you than for them. It helps you identify the track on which you should move to minimize the gap between what a prototype does and what the actual product should do to convince the customers to buy it.

Proper Project Management

To make the actual product, you have to go through the prototype. But deciding what the prototype should entail is also not a piece of cake. You have to keep many factors in mind while prioritizing the features of your product. In this case, when you are finding it difficult to decide what should be included, a prioritization framework can be of great help to you.

A prioritization framework consists of certain criteria that product teams of the company can use to rank features according to the business value in the order of priority. The framework allows you to minimize biases, avoid analysis paralysis, and more importantly, support decisions that are made strategically. Because it eliminates these biases, product management also becomes easier. 

With the help of frameworks, communicating the priorities to the leaders and stakeholders also becomes relatively easy.

The prioritization framework that you should choose depends on the nature of your product, the customers served, individual choices and the culture of the organization. Your product team has to pick the one that suits them best, and then apply it uniformly across the product. This takes us to the next part of the article. Here, we are going to share some tips that you can incorporate to successfully launch your product.

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Tips that Guarantee a Successful Product Launch

There are many companies that have made the mistake of presenting their final product to their audience without having any strategic product launch plan in place. As a result, most of them face financial issues and the promotion of products also becomes ineffective. To make a product launch successful, you’ll need proper research from reliable and experienced marketers. Here are some successful product launch tips:

Know The Details Of Your Product

What is the most important aspect of the product launch? Well, obviously, it’s the product itself! Therefore, it is essential that before launching the product everyone has a clear picture of what it offers. You should know how your product will fill the gap and benefit the people using it.

During the launch, you need to connect with an ample amount of people to make the product financially viable. This will only happen if your product satisfies the users in every aspect, like quality, functionality, and price. If all of this is in place, you’ll have a product that sells itself.

Putting forward the features that will most benefit the user is the first step that you need to follow for a successful product launch. You should even highlight these features in the launch.

Identify Your Competition

There is a product for almost everything in the market. Therefore, it is only natural that with time you’ll be up against massive competition. So how would you survive in the market then? It is only possible by knowing what the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors are.

Their strengths tell you about the advantage they have over you. You can use this information to bring improvements to your product and get a step ahead of them. Their weaknesses, on the other hand, can help you make a better pitch in the market.

It is also essential to know how your competitors launched their products and how they do their marketing. It will surely guide you on the path to promoting your products in a way that beats them.

Build a USP and UVP

Now you know who your audience is, what they want, and how you can help them. All that is left for you to do is convince those people that you are the best in the business and so is your product. 

You must show them the benefit that they are going to get if they purchase your product. For this, you’ll need to establish Unique Selling Proposition (USP) and Unique Value Proposition (UVP). These propositions tell everything important about your product to convince the customers that it is the best one available in the market.

Promote Your Launch and Product

Before you get into the launching part, it is essential to ensure that the product is completely ready to be launched on the market. Once everything is sorted about the product, only then should you know how to launch a product campaign.

At some point, you’ll have to create a buzz about the product in the market. You can use ads, press releases, and social media campaigns to reach out to as many people interested as you can. The team must come up with unique strategies to market the product. The promotion of the product should start well before the launch date so that there’s enough buzz in the market for you to gain instant acquisition.

Final Thoughts

For any company to succeed in making effective products, it is essential to follow a certain framework. Once you have everything in place, from idea to execution, develop in parts, and get instant feedback from the customer about the performance of each part. 

Once the product is completely developed, jump right into the promotion to create the necessary buzz. The buzz, in addition to various marketing strategies, will help you get customer acquisition. All of these factors, when placed together, enable you to create a successful product and launch.

About the author: Vibhu Dhariwal is a Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified, a Digital Marketing & Web Development company. He likes sharing his experience in product marketing, SaaS marketing, content marketing, and SEO with readers. To know more about him, you can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Vibhu Dhariwal Vibhu Dhariwal l Co-Founder & Director of Marketing at Digital Gratified Published on October 6, 2021, updated on March 1, 2024 · 8 min read