The first Alice.com homepage is up and running. Our graphic designer doesn’t start for a couple more weeks, so you won’t see anything flashy, but it feels good to start building the site.
Seeing Alice up in lights begs the question: How are we going to roll out this business?
The Alice.com Pre-Launch Strategy
There is quite a bit of discussion and advice online about the best pre-launch strategy, but it really boils down to one simple thing: Getting as many potential customers to pay attention to you as possible. For us, this goal translates into two objectives: 1) build a pre-launch waiting list/following of potential customers; and, 2) get the attention of influential bloggers and media so that they write about us at launch and beyond.
How will we do this? Good question. Here are a few key themes that will guide our plan.
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Build Curiosity. You’ll notice a subtle hint on Alice.com about our market space, but no real details on the business. You will see various schools of thought on how much to share about the biz pre-launch (in particular I like this post that calls it the Big Bang versus Darwinian launch approach), but one of the things we learned at Jellyfish was the importance of building suspense pre-launch and pulling back the curtain slowly. There is a balance here of course, but consider a site like Akoha.com . By staying somewhat stealth they can give targeted media the inside scoop. In my opinion, they have a much better chance of attracting blog and media attention with this secretive approach:
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Give Something Valuable. You have to give your audience a reason to pay attention, whether it is a blogger that needs a well reasoned argument or an end customer that is bombarded with countless marketing messages and needs a good reason to tune you in. The best kind of value here also encourages users to spread your brand virally across the Internet. Brian and I are already talking about how to do this with Alice.com, and I’m excited to share some of the ideas that we cook up soon.
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Have Some Fun. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Using humor is a great way to engage people and personalize your company. One hot area you see this today is viral videos, which seem to be the pre-launch strategy du jour. I think many of these videos get a little too goofy, but some companies (see here and here ) have used them to great success.
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Have Personal Credibility. This is a point that Ben Yoskovitz makes in his post about launch strategy that I really, really like. The message here is “don’t be a faceless start up.” If you’ve earned some credibility, use it to your company’s advantage. That’s why you see the Flywheelblog linked on the bottom of Alice.com. I’m much more inclined to engage with a site online if I can see the people behind it.
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Back it up with a Remarkable Product. Most important of all, be careful not to over hype and under deliver. I watched with a bit of dread the launch of Cuil.com recently. They did a great job of building up pre-launch buzz and got amazing coverage on launch day. The problem is that their site didn’t match the hype. The backlash was pretty harsh (see here and here for example) and they are going to be hard pressed to recover. The Cuil experience is something we will work very hard to avoid in our pre-launch plan.
Please make sure to visit our very 1st home page and drop us your e-mail. And if you have a favorite pre-launch strategy that has worked for a company, we’d love to hear about it.
September 15th, 2008 at 4:24 am
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