1. Perfection is a buzz-kill
Despite what your grade school teacher may have told you, perfection isn’t everything. In fact a working prototype is excuse enough to begin creating buzz for your product. All you need is an idea, a way to demonstrate it, and a good story about what problem your product solves for its customers. The minute you have these three elements, get your product online.
2. Pre-sell to jumpstart your flow
Don’t wait until you have the inventory to start taking sales. Create demand to “pull” your supply…and start your marketing and sales months before you get the inventory.
3. Grow your evangelist from the ground up
Begin to identify potential brand evangelists early on in the lifecycle of your product. Grow your beta users into power users by letting them know their opinion matters, and showing they have early impact. Seed review opportunities and survey customers to see who would be willing to be an evangelist or offer media testimonials down the road. No one tells your story better than your customers.
4. Give samples, reward early adopters
Once you are satisfied with your prototype or first version, consider that your first 100 should go to the leading bloggers and tweeters with followers in your target market. You probably won’t have your final inventory created when you do this. That is fine.
5. It takes a village; invest in your community
We’ve seen a lot of great products recently coming off Kickstarter.com. For sure, designers are using it to test market an idea to see if the idea gets traction. But, they are also building a small group of motivated and inspired people that are emotionally connected to the product. Think of it as kindling for your fire.
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