“I created a WordPress plugin and sold $4k of licenses in the 1st hour of launch.”

We’ve heard it all before and you probably tuned into this very podcast to learn how someone went from eating ramen noodles, to living on the 4-hour work week island.

As entrepreneurs, we’re not just looking for a big payday, but also to see our product adopted and loved by the masses. It’s an earmark of success that drives us to do what we do. Getting mixed up in just thinking about the money, can cause unnecessary burden and stress.

But along the way, if we don’t convert our failures into lessons — as my friend Cory says — we’re doomed to stay trapped on the hamster wheel of launching a product business.

Today, I’d like to share with you the lessons I’ve learned launching one of my products, Conductor plugin.

Product Launch Lessons Video Presentation

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10 Lessons Learned Launching Conductor

In February of 2014, we decided that we would turn our simple minimize blocks plugin (internal name) into a product.

Six months later, we launched a paid-beta program that generated 4 thousand dollars in revenue in it’s first hour. Here are the lessons we learned:

Lesson 1: Knowing when you have a product

There’s an implicit challenge to running an agency and a product company — time.

To that point, you need to make up for lost R&D product time that you’re spending on deliverables. I like to leverage our client work as part of our product research. It’s important to look at everything in scale:

If you find yourself answering yes to the questions above, chances are you’re onto something that could be your next new product. Warning, checking those boxes off, isn’t the only task at hand — you still need to build a good product.

Scratching your own itch first:

When we were building Conductor, we looked to improve our own internal workflow first before taking customer feature requests. We saw commonalities across client projects we were building and looked at our sales pipeline to see what potential a new plugin could solve.

This effectively saved us time and allowed us to make more money on projects in the long run. And because we ALL suffer from Imposter Syndrome, I thought:

“If it doesn’t sell, at least we’ll still use it internally.”

Lesson 2: Start promoting ASAP

As soon as we had a working model of the plugin, I started creating teaser videos. This wasn’t a targeted marketing campaign, it was just general coverage of our upcoming product. I simply wanted to gauge if people were listening, was there any interest, and what was the reaction.

Each new feature would get a new video or talked about on one of our podcast episodes. It started to build the anticipation I was looking for. The last thing I wanted to do was build a product behind the proverbial curtain, only to ship my product and then have to educate my market on our offering.

Starting out early built the hype and the curiosity, which ultimately lead to a successful launch day.

Lesson 3: I formed an advisory board early

I was able to recruit 6 super-talented folks from around the WordPress community. Each brought their own unique voice and talents, which helped tremendously with positioning the early product for further development.

It was important that I secured people that believed in us and the product. It was an early boost to confidence, which is just as important as having early customers. It also delivered some (small) market awareness leading up to the launch.

I’d advise anyone looking to launch a new product to find a group of individuals that could contribute a bit of outsider’s perspective on your product. Go a step further and recruit people from outside of your inner-circle if possible — you’re going to want real unbiased feedback.

Lesson 4: Hands-on Demonstrations

In Ash Maurya’s book, Running Lean – Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, he explores the sweet-spot of early product demonstration. Somewhere in the range of 30 – 35 demonstrations is what you’re going to aim for.

It was truly an energizing experience, but be warned, they aren’t your customer — yet.

We conducted nearly 50 interviews with individual developers, designers, marketing leads and agency owners. Pulling as much feedback as possible during the calls as we could. Some lasted 20 minutes others went well over an hour.

Out of these interviews, we had only 1 person that wasn’t as impressed (compared to others) with just a few that we could feel didn’t fully understand what we were pitching. We took detailed notes during each demo, which we still review today for additional product or marketing ideas.

These interviews are crucial, not just for the potential features of your product, but to observe how people react to it. I spent a lot of time observing their emotional reaction, if they shifted in their seat or if their eyes looked around the screen.

It was easy to tell the people who were really excited, apart from those that wanted the call to be over. Fully-engaged people would start to explain what problems Conductor could solve for them or our potential customer base. You could hear the passion in their voice.

It was truly an energizing experience, but be warned, they aren’t your customer — yet.