10 Must Haves for Your Next Online Launch

Do you have a launch plan or are you just winging it?

We’ve worked with so many entrepreneurs, small business owners and coaches over the years and it’s always really interesting to see different people’s approach to an online launch.

As you probably already know, we’re a bit “belts and braces” here. We’re big fans of testing. We like to have everything in place. We want to make sure it works.

Why? Because we want it to be easy to buy our products when we launch them. We don’t want to have technical problems that could have been avoided, we don’t want to have to go back to our customers and explain what went wrong. We want our customers to have the confidence to buy from us, time and time again, knowing that it’s easy to both buy and use our products. We’re kind of obsessive about it. We test and we test and we test and we test.

Do you know what some people do? They like to tell everyone they’re launching a brand new product, pick a date out of the air… and then they just wing it! 

Which is fine, until things start to go wrong and then full panic starts to set in!

Now, we’re big advocates of “better done than perfect” and pushing yourself out of your comfort zone… but this is a crazy approach to take with your business, because if you rush it and wing it and something goes wrong then your buyer confidence takes a hit. Once that confidence is knocked, it’s much harder to win that confidence back and sell this product and your future products.

So… to keep things simple (we like simple), here is a list of must haves, as far as we’re concerned these are non-negotiable, you have to have them…

Our Must Haves Launch List

1. You must give yourself enough time to launch a product from both a technical perspective but also from a marketing perspective. We recommend giving yourself 90 days to launch a product, bare minimum would be 30 days if you already have your messaging dialled in and a hungry-for-your-product audience.
2. You must have dates in your calendar for all of the important launch related dates. Waiting List Page / Webinars / Workshops / Tech Ready / Ads / Challenges / Launch Window… etc.
3. You must have a waiting list page where interested customers-to-be can sign up for your new thing.
4. You must have an email sequence in place to nurture these customers-to-be and get them very very excited about your new product with at least one email (but not more than two emails) per week.
5. You must have the sales page and all your tech ready 2 weeks prior to your launch date. Yes two whole weeks, fully tested and operational. This is important, you do not want to be testing everything the day of your launch. It’s too stressful and you won’t have enough time to fix anything that goes wrong!
6. You must have tested your payment gateway(s) in live mode, with a real card.
7. You must have your launch window email sequence ready to go one week before your launch date, so you’re not writing random ad hoc emails every day of your launch window. This doesn’t mean you can’t tweak as you go, but have a solid base to work from.
8. You must listen to your customers-to-be, answer their questions and update your FAQs on your sales page with the most common questions.
9. You must keep your branding consistent across all mediums (FB, IG, Website, Sales pages, email, etc.)
10. You must keep your language consistent and “on brand” across all mediums.

So that’s it, those are our must haves. There’s obviously a lot more that goes into to a launch than these 10 must haves, but if you don’t have the above then your launch won’t be as good as it could be and you don’t want that, do you? Who needs the stress!?

If you’re interested in learning more about launches, websites and just have the general emotional support and accountability you need for running your online business, we have a Mentoring Membership which comes with Ask Us Anything sessions, co-working sessions, a community of other entrepreneurs just like you and a lots of other useful stuff – without being overwhelming.

Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash