In this episode of the Commerce Journey Podcast, Cory and I discuss preparing for eCommerce product launches.
You can listen to the audio:
Or watch the episode on YouTube:
Things to consider when preparing a launch
- When should you launch
- Planning initial inventory
- Getting your order flow worked out
- Test batches or slow launch
- Getting feedback
- Post mortem your launch
There are several ways to subscribe to Commerce Journey
- Subscribe on iTunes
- On Google Podcasts
- Follow us on Spotify
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel
- Or directly via RSS
YouTube in particular will have videos that are not otherwise on the podcast feeds.
Machine Transcript – Preparing for eCommerce Product Launches
Brian Krogsgard 00:03
Hello, and welcome to the Commerce Journey podcast. My name is Brian Krogsgard. I am here as usual with my partner Cory Miller. Hey partner. Hey, Cory. Hey, how you doing?
Cory Miller 00:15
Pretty good. I’m excited to talk about this topic today, because it’s pretty relevant.
Brian Krogsgard 00:19
Yeah, we’re talking about planning for launches and getting yourself set up, whether it’s from a, you know, scheduling or a task perspective. Or maybe it’s even like scaling. Making sure your website is ready for dealing with increased traffic is if that’s the type of thing that’s going to happen. And you know, what our partner GoDaddy Pro, they help make that happen. You can go to commercejourney.com/go to check out GoDaddy Pro, and they can help you plan for the scale that you need with your eCommerce website. They’ll help you get started. They got some great deals, bundled extensions, all inside that link. If you go to commercejourney.com/go and check out GoDaddy Pro. That is an important element of planning for launches and planning for scale, which is what you hope you get out of those launches. Right, Cory?
Cory Miller 01:12
Oh, yeah, launches are so fantastic parts of digital marketing in particular, like, and I love launch days. Yeah, no matter what it is,
Brian Krogsgard 01:21
it’s how you start, you know, you put it out there in the world, you see what comes back? And you see like, what’s a, you know, what’s the temperature? If you have like a social audience that’s giving you live feedback, you see, orders start to come in? You know, there’s, there’s a lot that goes on there. What I want to ask you first is how do you set expectations when you’re trying to launch something like, how do you how do you try to, you know, kind of initiate your thought process to know like, Okay, today is gonna be a boom or bust? Or I have no idea like, how do you prepare yourself emotionally? How do you prepare in terms of like, you know, what you might have to do from a team and logistics standpoint?
Cory Miller 02:01
Oh, man, you jump right in? And that’s such a good question. Because it’s part of I mean, it’s part of the launch process, as you never wanted to be disappointed. But it happens. And I think my, my difficulty with it is probably setting when I think about this question is setting unrealistic expectations. You know, going, Okay, we’re launching this product, it’s gonna go like, it’s gonna break the internet, it’s gonna be so well, you know.
Brian Krogsgard 02:27
Yeah. I guess you’re gonna be on the front page of Reddit, it’s gonna be a top post on Instagram, or whatever. Like, wherever things are important for you, you know, you don’t want to set those expectations too high. You want to plan for the potential if it’s realistic, but you want to try to capture like, what’s real for me in my store?
Cory Miller 02:48
I think the important word with it is stretch. You don’t want to be unrealistic, but you want it to stretch you, you know, Dan Sullivan, who’s strategic coaches kind of renowned for saying like 10 X, think when you’re thinking about the future, thinking about cool things like this, thinking 10 times better than what you’re already at? That’s a really good stretch thinking for me. Because you start thinking through I mean, one, a lot of people I want to talk to you about this type of thing, like a big lunch, is the worry is the system going to, like, handle it all? You know, we’ve seen that recently, you know, that was part of the topic for this particular episode is, you know, when you got a big, big launch, like the vice president nomination for the Democratic Party, not the states, for instance, and the eCommerce site being down.
Brian Krogsgard 03:41
Yeah, and that one was interesting as the, you know, vice presidential announcement, like Cory just said, and obviously, their infrastructure provider, at least, or didn’t plan for it appropriately, or they got more feedback than they expected, whatever. That’s the type of thing where there’s some, you know, like, Okay, we’ve got the audience we know, this is a big deal to the national news items. So there’s like, there’s a planning element there that is a known. So those are some things that you can control. If you foresee that they’re gonna they could be an issue. There’s other things though, where you don’t exactly know what the response is, like, it might surprise you, right?
Cory Miller 04:18
Yeah, to most often mine has been the underwhelming one side of things. Like we’ve spent six months working on this product. And then we finally got it out. And crickets, you know, chirp or the drip is real slow. So, you know, I think the goal in terms of stretch is really good because it gets you in the mindset of thinking through can all this handle it, but the mindset of like, what would we need to do to hit 10 X, you know, or whatever the stretch goal is, and that I think that’s absolutely key to have the stretch goal, to start thinking in a bigger mindset, but also the realism of like, okay, maybe it’s not gonna break the internet today. Yeah, maybe We’ll get some sales. But I think the bigger question launches and I’m always excited for launches like that launch days of the my favorite days on the web, because it’s putting something out into the world and seeing what somebody is going to do with it. But I think the other perspective is, what are we learning? What are we hoping to learn today? We put something out in the world. Same goes for Commerce Journey, you know, we you and I had been playing this for months. And we thought, okay, here are some assumptions we’re making. And when we finally launched it, what, what what about those assumptions are correct? What are wrong? And what did we learn from them?
Brian Krogsgard 05:33
Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you were getting out there. Because what you can control even if you don’t, you know, if you’re not, if you can’t control getting 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands or whatever, you know, people looking at your products launch, what you can control is, what does this product look like? What’s the execution? Like? What’s the flow for the customer? And I think that’s a big part of that launches, trying to test how does this actually work? What happens when I go to the site? It looks look right? Does did my average or my advertisement set up? appropriately? Are my you know, are my descriptions all there are my you know, like, when we get an order? Do we know what we’re doing with it? Like, do we know how we’re fulfilling our order?
Cory Miller 06:21
Do we have our automated emails when they buy something?
Brian Krogsgard 06:24
Yeah. Do we sell someone a thank you? Or do we have our, you know, cart recovery, Email Setup, like there’s some meat and potatoes type of stuff that you can plan and make sure that you’re executing properly. And that’s going to give you peace of mind, no matter what your traffic setup is, like on launch day.
Cory Miller 06:43
Now, I think of two types of people, one that’s like, more like you and I, maybe more like me, I think you’d like to prepare a little bit, maybe more for lunches and stuff. Mine is, is it good enough? for lunch? Let’s go. Let’s see. How we check the essential lists? Like is the website up is gonna glance is there not a lot of errors? Does the cart work, you know…
Brian Krogsgard 07:08
Can someone actually checkout?
Cory Miller 07:10
Yeah, there’s the other end of the spectrum, which is let’s prepare for every contingency. And I think you can get really tripped up on both. I think there’s pros and cons of both. But the other side is, I want everything perfect, and perfect is is not an existent thing. Within eCommerce, especially,
Brian Krogsgard 07:29
You know, there’s some things that you just don’t even know until people look at it, and they start telling you. And if you’re trying to assume all the things that they’re going to want, you could be addressing stuff that is not ever on anyone else’s radar who’s actually shopping on your site, which I think gets to what you’re talking about for the potential pitfalls of over planning, like if you spend weeks trying to plan for something you think will occur, and then it never is an issue, you just wasted weeks of preparation time.
Cory Miller 07:57
And my thing is the tragedy of life, it’s an Albert Schweitzer quote is what dies within yourself as you live. And so it’s the and I probably butchered that quote, but it’s the idea that if you don’t push whatever you’ve been working on out into the light, and allow people to potentially criticize it, to potentially hate it. But also on the other side, to potentially say, this is what I’ve been waiting for. Then, to me, that’s a tragedy. I think the other side of preparing for every contingency and worrying about perfection, you know, perfection, which will never happen, can trip you up from pushing that cool thing you’ve been working on for so long in light. And you know, in the sphere that you and I worked in for a very long time. designers and developers have this prolifically. perfectionism is a poison within those particular roles in life. And I’ve been, I’ve been trying to get very good over the years to say like, Man, you’re good enough as someone’s excellent. Yeah, for a lot of people that struggle with perfectionism. That’s a good motto and mantra to think through.
Brian Krogsgard 09:01
Yeah. And then sometimes there’ll be things where you never thought about them. And then your first several customers, like reach out to you and say, Hey, have you thought about XYZ? I remember when I launched my first digital membership with post status, the first time I launched a club membership on that, I only had checkout available with stripe. And I launched it, I got on a plane and I went out of town. And I went actually to a conference where I was meeting my customers, my brand new customers and people that were wanting to be customers. And something I got over and over again was Hey, do you accept PayPal? Or will you accept PayPal? And I was like, I haven’t honestly thought about it. But what I discovered is that for my type of product that was kind of a fun money for those people their PayPal balance, you know, like cuz it’s not in your bank all the time. If you carry a PayPal balance, you might just pay to pay for something with PayPal. It’s like alright, that’s a that’s good that’s coming out of my you know my education budget. That is left over there in my business, PayPal or whatever, and it was an easy way for them to pay. And, Cory, I mean, you know now for that project, I think we probably have maybe 40% or more of our customers that are subscribing through PayPal subscriptions, which would have shocked me because you know, PayPal, I think, maybe not quite rightfully so. But they’re kind of notorious in the payment space for not being like developer friendly. And a lot of our customers. And a lot of our customers are developers, and they want to pay with PayPal. So it’s funny, like, sometimes you make these assumptions, like, sure everybody want to use a credit card or debit card, and you know, we’ll just have stripe Checkout, it works great. And it did, except for the fact that a lot of people, we would have missed a lot of sales if we had not turned on paypal payments. And that was something that didn’t fortunately, it didn’t take a lot of effort. But I launched and found out, it wasn’t one of those things where I had to, you know, overthink how I was doing it from the from the get go.
Cory Miller 10:59
As you’re sharing that story. I mean, you know, like three pops into my mind that very much parallel that, but it made me remind me of a couple things is one be willing to be wrong. If you approach this whole entrepreneurial endeavor called eCommerce, you know, be willing to be wrong, be willing to make mistakes in the, the whole point of it is like approach it like a lab laboratory experiment and say, I know making mistakes, it’s going to help me get to my end goal. But I have to be willing to and here’s another one wrote, be open. And be surprised. You were surprised? I almost bet you back in the day, you’d been like, every developer hates PayPal, I’m not even going to do a PayPal option. And then these people start asking for it. And you’re like, it surprised you.
Brian Krogsgard 11:51
this exactly how it went down. I was kind of stunned. But then once a bit, but it came clear to me I understood, it’s just understanding how my customers how their, you know, actions as a buyer, were different from my assumptions as a seller. And that was a great a great thing to learn.
Cory Miller 12:11
And you would have never have known that had you not, you know, pushed your your product on the cart out into the public and said, Hmm, would you be willing to buy this get on the plane? Which by the way, most people are probably listening to this going. You did what? Yeah, it was crazy. But your thing and then you got on the plane where you’re in this is back in the day when like Wi Fi wasn’t a regular thing on planes? Yeah. And so you did two things. One, you had the courage to push it out into the light, you know, and I think that’s what most of it, most of my success is just being willing to push what I’ve been working on into the light. That’s it? Yeah, that’s not I didn’t have any special genius. It was just I had the courage enough to push in enough out into light where someone could go, yes or no? Pass maybe, huh, no awesome, you know, make that judgment. And you know, your story. And all of our stories like this are symbolic of be willing to be surprised. But you can’t be surprised if you never push that thing out into the light of day.
Brian Krogsgard 13:09
You know, my timing worked out because that conference was coming up. And I was going to that conference. And I’d quit my job to you know, build this, build this product out. So I gave myself this deadline of like, I have to launch it by this day. And it just kind of worked out those as I was getting on the plane going to that conference and seeing those customers out. That was more serendipitous, though, what about when you have control over the timing of your product launch? So you’ve got a new product? Maybe you’ve been working on it getting your supply chain worked out? You know, you’re dealing with manufacturing issues and planning, you know, how much inventory you’re going to have? What How do you think someone should plan from a timing perspective? When they’re strategizing products? Like? Do you think the seasonality is something that’s important? Like do you launch when it’s your peak season? Or do you launch when it’s a slow season? And you can learn a lot? What do you think in that regard?
Cory Miller 14:00
You and I both been here but it’s like decision fatigue, and paralysis like we we end up so over I wonder what I will set what I want to say is guard from over analyzing all of this, but it was the first like knee jerk thing I have when I when you started that question is like, guard about the fact that you could, you know, decide this to death. You could fret about this to death and never launch. I think you should have get informed hunches. I mean, you and I did for Commerce Journey and are different projects. We thought okay, this feels right. We had some informed decision support that and I mean, you know, like, should we launch it on Tuesday, should we launch on Monday, and at least having the conversation but not getting drowned in you know, that paralysis of just over information and you know, to death, I see too many entrepreneurs kind of getting To that point where they just get paralyzed by it. So, at some point, you know, we we thought over the years that I think we’re like we don’t launch on Mondays, is we think, you know, people are just returning back to work probably have a lot of emails to go through for instance or meetings. Yeah, we also don’t launch software products on a Friday. Yeah. Because if, if they’ve got a bug or something like that, which they all do, right, then we got a weekend where, okay, well, somebody could buy and, you know, be snug, you know, be paused for three days and be really, really mad. So we didn’t do those type of things. And that probably helped us to say, okay, Tuesday or Wednesday, or good lunch days for that particular product and industry. But, you know, let’s say the Vida Bars is our kind of base case study for all this. You know, she’s got a following. That is, it’s more personal health care thing, which is a organic shampoo bar and conditioner bar. So she’s got an Instagram following, you know, people are scrolling through Instagram, just kind of think through that, how do people use it? And yes, at least check the box. To me.
Brian Krogsgard 16:03
One thing on that side of things with the physical goods. I know, like a seasonal launch in terms of getting ready for the fall with, you know, Black Friday, Cyber Monday preparing for Christmas, that’s everybody’s busiest time of year, I think you can get some hype in terms of launching, preparing for that time. But I think that it’s more important to, to know that your launch is going to go well, you know, like to know, I’m ready. And I think if you’re not seasoned with product launches, I’d rather launch in like the spring or summer when it’s a little slower. What do you think about that?
Cory Miller 16:42
It’s like planting the, what’s that quote about playing and trade? The best time to play in the tree was yesterday. Yeah, I would rather launch than wait another day, I’ve got a project right now that I just feel like, we’re burning time on it. You know, like, every day that we don’t launch burns, another opportunity to serve the customers. So maybe you don’t want on Cyber Monday, you know, your busiest day. But you at least think through, okay. It goes back to the paralysis, I think where, okay, if I don’t launch, then maybe it’s not a good idea to launch on Cyber Monday, Black Friday, Christmas Day, but I want to at least launch and so for me, I would that feels like months in the season of time that you’re waiting on. And so I’d be leery of that. I think.
Brian Krogsgard 17:37
And I think I’d leave those like high profile, you know, the week before Black Friday type launches to the experts that have launched hundreds of products. If I’m early in my game. I don’t think I do that. Well, you think about that?
Cory Miller 17:50
Yeah, for sure. Like, I don’t know, if we would launch the two bars, you know, around Christmas, necessarily. But maybe weeks before Christmas. Especially. I mean, that’s, that’s a peak buying time for eCommerce in general. And I think, you know, we saw the ramp up into the winter months, our hypothesis was always, you know, if you’re in front of a computer, and our stuff was software, so if you’re in front of the computer, in the winter, it’s warm. You know, in summer, it’s hot, you want to get outside, you don’t want to necessarily be in front of a computer. We saw that with, you know, email out of office responders and things like that. Yeah, I think again, just you know, doing some thoughtful consideration, asking a couple of your target customers know, what do you think about when do you typically, you know, when you buy gifts for people, if you’ve got a gift thing, my buddy runs his big, you know, gift shop, essentially for guys like kitschy guy stuff, you know? So when when do you buy those kitschy guy gifts for the men in your life? I think that would be a question he could ask.
Brian Krogsgard 18:54
Yeah, and I think the other reason that I, in general, like the idea of a spring or summer launch, is it gives you several months to plan for the seasonality with the holidays. And if your product is newer, if your whole business is newer, or if your product is newer, you can use that time to get reviews, you may even make iterations on your product, like you may go through a batch of you know, 500 products, and say, You know what, we’ve been getting pretty good feedback about this. But if we could just make this one change, people would have really loved it more. And that can give you time to iterate on, even if it’s the design of the product, if it’s the flows of how you’re asking for reviews, and you find out like, oh, we’re only getting like, half of 1% of people to review our product. And we really want to do it differently. Or, you know, we’re not really converting on these cart recovery emails or our copy on the site could really use iterating. If you don’t find that stuff out during the slower season. It’s going to make it more painful. You’re not going to get the closure that you like the deal flow that you want, right in the in the holiday season. So I think that there’s a lot of advantages for launching outside of the the peak season even though you don’t have the like, Oh, look, it’s brand new type of vibe. I think most people, they’re going to be excited that hey, I just found something I was looking for. Right?
Cory Miller 20:13
Yeah, in on they know you could do a soft launch, you know maybe months before and, and bench test your sstems.
Brian Krogsgard 20:21
Yeah, but isn’t limited quantity or something like that.
Cory Miller 20:24
Yeah, which is what we’re doing with Vida Bars. So recently, we thought I was really pushing to do a subscription service, every three months, you just automatically get the bar shipped to you. From a recurring revenue standpoint, I always wanted my projects to have recurring revenue in them. But we were worried about the manufacturing of this. So we started to sell it in batches. That is cool, because that built so we found that as an opportunity it built buzz it build excitement and anticipation to say, okay, we’re we’re on our fourth batch now. And just yesterday was telling me like, okay, now fifth and the 20th when I think we can do this, so we’ve stabilized the manufacturing of it, and now can go Okay, we tapped maybe we tell customers that was your point is like, tell him the fifth and the 20th? Well, there’s buzz too, because that’s a launch event. And I thought of the four bestest we’ve had. Is this buzz and excitement? And I haven’t heard and all sudden batches here, go get it, you know. And you’re part of batch number for those customers batch. And for batch number three, best number two?
Brian Krogsgard 21:23
Yeah, let’s think about crack makes it very personal. Yeah. How much do you learn across each batch? You know, and you learn a lot of things like, Okay, well, if we can, let’s say we can sell 500 units for a single batch in a normal period, that’s going to give you some idea because you didn’t know like, maybe you had a demand for 1000, or maybe had a demand for only 100. And if you’re doing that off peak, well, then you can say, Okay, well, if I assume that I’m going to be two to three times more busy. In the peak season, you’re also improving your ability to earn revenue and peak season, by having enough inventory, where that’s always one of those things you want to manage, right? When you’re doing a product launch, you don’t want to be sitting there, say with $10,000 of inventory, if you’re, you know, flow of products is really only going to get a couple thousand dollars over a reasonable period of time, like a couple months or something. And you don’t have to guess in terms as much. I mean, there’s always some guessing with inventory flow, right. But you don’t have to guess as much in terms of how much you need to set aside for inventory going into a holiday and assuming people have their peak season holidays. Like I think what 90% of eCommerce categories are probably peak season Atlantean in the in the winter.
Cory Miller 22:37
Yeah, we see the build up, especially in United States, because we have such an emphasis on Thanksgiving, like Fridays, and all that holiday season. And then tax-wise for the United States, you know, is right before the end of the year. So maybe there’s a bonus, or maybe you’re thinking through taxes, if you’re a b2b business to business type business. Yeah, maybe you want to know, sneak those in ahead of time. So it’s interesting, I always ask different, you know, entrepreneurs in different categories, what is your peak season, because it varies from time to time.
Brian Krogsgard 23:09
Yeah, I’m using that as kind of my default, but somebody could have one that’s totally different for a whole different reason, like maybe have a huge professional conference, that’s, you know, 20,000 people show up too, and you sell all your stuff around that. I don’t know, it just depends. But using the holidays is a great default for us to consider. I think.
Cory Miller 23:27
That’s a good point, though, I want to I want to tag on that. Because I would use everything you can as an opportunity to think about a launch a launch event specifically. So like September is Recovery Month in the addiction system, substance abuse. Valentine’s Day, the anniversary of your business, your birthday, Rebecca, and another another one of my partners that you know, used, our birthdays are a day apart. So we used April, end of April to do a flash sale for our birthdays. I use everything I can to encapsulate it in a launch event. So leverage all those things, Labor Day, whatever kind of us holidays or any holidays, wherever you’re listening to, or for your business or your product. You know, we celebrate the birthday of our products over the years. And we made a big deal about our anniversaries y’all did.
Brian Krogsgard 24:19
I loved the iThemes anniversaries, it was always a good one just to remind me like oh yeah, I think this has been in this a long time. I trust them. And you know what, there’s something from them and I want to pick up and it’s been a while and here I go
Cory Miller 24:32
Well remember when we when we had our partnership solidified in Post Status. That was your five year anniversary
Brian Krogsgard 24:39
It was the five year anniversary for Post Status. It was a milestone.
Cory Miller 24:42
We made a big deal of it. Here’s an here’s the reasons why I’ve wanted to segue into this Brian cuz I want to get your feedback on this too. Sure. Number one, customers love launch events. I mean, I don’t know how many geeks that I know that mark when Apple is releasing products because they want to listen to the live stuff and know what’s going o buy next.
Brian Krogsgard 25:00
Yeah, that’s like a next level community. Like a cult, a cult community, a tribe, like you’ve said before that you want to build. That’s like the epitome of it. Right?
Cory Miller 25:10
Yeah, so customers love launch events. I mean, from posts as being along for the journey, it makes you feel that you are you belong to something bigger that you’re part of this, that you contribute this. It’s also like our five year anniversary post that this was a reason to say, we had been around for five years. We’re gonna be around for the next five years.
Brian Krogsgard 25:29
Trust us for the because of this.
Cory Miller 25:31
Yeah. And so we’ll do the same thing with Commerce Journey years have an anniversary. Well, kitschy stuff, you know, well. Yeah, but like we used you been in Oklahoma City. For you, though.
Brian Krogsgard 25:43
Oh yeah yeah. I see.
Cory Miller 25:45
Thinking of our partnership, as a way to say like, post that it’s still here. Yeah, so I use it customers love that stuff. You know, because it’s an event that they can kind of be a part of a little bit in the second thing, I’d say. And I want your feedback on all this bread is like it shows activity, like you just said, it was a reminder for you, when we do those kitschy little birthday parties and had cake for a software product that you go in your mind. I think this is still around. So it shows activity. Two, that you’re still there, it’s top brings you top of mind, for your customer, community and things like that
Brian Krogsgard 26:20
it makes your store more personable as well like to relate to the people by the story. I completely agree with everything you want my feedback, I don’t have any to offer. I just agree with that. And I want to ask you about another element. And I think that this is one that people often will forget. So let’s say that you do start to get some attention for what you’re doing. And people are sharing it. And I think one of the things people miss sometimes is they don’t really make it easy for people to share their launch. For instance, you can prepare, like, here are some pictures you can use to showcase that this is happening. Here’s our logo, here’s our branding. Here’s what we’re doing, especially and you know, depending on the realm, you’re in digital products, this is super common physical products that can be to like, for instance, if you’re sharing, maybe like a Kickstarter or something where you’re something that’s encouraging people to share what they just bought, or what they just participated in with others. If you prepare those assets for them to be able to do that, well, they’re going to be way better than if you just let them do it themselves. So some kind of like branding, pack, launch pack, share this text with your friends, like this is the absolute best Tumblr you could ever find. Here’s what makes it special and like you have a little blurb about what makes that Tumblr special, and you help you assist them in sharing that with others.
Cory Miller 27:40
Absolutely, you got to think about, okay, we’re gonna want people to share this, I don’t make it so easy. So flip the flip the table for a second be on the other side. Okay, Brian’s launching this thing. I want to promote it. I’m his friend, I care about him. I want to see his his project succeed in the world. Okay, I’m gonna go to Facebook and then put it on there.
Brian Krogsgard 28:01
Yeah,
Cory Miller 28:02
Just like you said, having thinking through those type of collateral pieces or whatever. But you hit it on the head, make it as easy as possible. So that means here’s what you could say about it. You know, make it easy for someone to talk about what you’re doing. You know, we’re trying to refund that with Vida Bars. But it’s organic shampoo and conditioners for curly hair people. Yeah, that’s our first you know, thesis we’ve been testing. So make it easy. Like you just said you knew it? No, actually, I was talking to Sherry, my friend Sherry yesterday. And she was like, that’s right. For curly hair people. Yeah. Because, you know, my daughter has curly hair.
Brian Krogsgard 28:37
You know, if you don’t make that tagline for them, then they’ll make up the tagline for you. And then you’re at, you’re at the risk of whatever they come up with. Right?
Cory Miller 28:46
And it could be you know, not, it could be good. It could help you refined it. But also Yeah, you’re absolutely right, like, just lower the bar. But the other thing I thought about is you you’re talking about being deliberate, you know, yeah, but I have found over and over, it’s just a part of the human condition. You have to ask people, you can’t just assume don’t assume, ask, like, you know, when you’re putting something out, will you share this with people that are you know, like Nita Marsh curly hair?
Brian Krogsgard 29:14
Yeah, please share, please share what we’re doing. Or we know you know, someone else that has curly hair, so will you please talk to them? And you know, here’s a here’s something a little something a thank you card that you’re making that ask with? Or here’s some stickers on it or something like that.
Cory Miller 29:30
Like we’re very deliberate in this podcast episode, and those on video probably saw me when you were talking about the sponsorship. You can’t see it on this on podcast, but I was pointing down at the GoDaddy Pro logo.
Brian Krogsgard 29:41
Yeah. There it is. That’s right.
Cory Miller 29:44
Hey! These are our partners. If you like what you’re hearing today. Would you go check this out? commercejourney.com/go dash webinar?
Brian Krogsgard 29:54
Yeah, wait, that’s for our webinars. This is just slash go. That’s okay. We have special links for tracking And, Cory, I’m glad you did that. Because that gets me into what I want to talk about next is How do you do? metrics? How did you and how, and then I want to lead into follow up as well. Like, how, how do we learn from this launch? Right? So yeah, what do they call? There’s like a, like a post? Not a battle, but like a post mortem. post mortem. Yeah, like the post mortem recap. Yeah. What What happened here? What can we do better next time.
Cory Miller 30:27
So the way I approach business in YouTube ranks you love analytics is everything is is a dashboard is like a video game, have a dashboard. So like, I want to use every piece of data I can to analyze it, and learn from it and figure out how to do better the next time again, we’re personas is a laboratory. So if you approach it with the mindset of this is a video game, you know, we’ve gained, right? We’re gamers.
Brian Krogsgard 30:55
It’s been a while it’s been a long time for me.
Cory Miller 30:58
Yeah, now we have kids, they’re gaming, but, but I always loved it, because I could see my high score, you know, and I could also see where I ranked with other people in the game. This is the old back in arcade days, you know, you see your leaderboard, I use data every chance I can. So every possible chance. I mean, it’s simple. Just saying make sure Google Analytics is on your site, when you launch. Yeah, make sure you’re tracking links, make sure you’re trying as much as data as you can to test those assumptions we talked about. So I always try to create a dashboard for everything we do, you know, at Commerce Journey. It’s right now it’s traffic. And it’s email. It’s our email list. And it’s our Facebook group.
Brian Krogsgard 31:36
Yeah. If you had a launch checklist, which you should, you should have a launch checklist for doing a new product. And it had things like the social elements, the website elements, are, you know, fulfillment? Did we did we fulfill these products within two days so that they could be there within three or four, whatever, like, you have this list of stuff? And then you go back and you say, Okay, how did we perform on these things that we accomplished what we want? Did we get the return that we expected? Did we spend, I don’t know, $2 per lead, like we planned or did it cost us more? Or did we not get the conversions we expected from those leads with those, you know, with the, you know, paid advertisement that whatever your thing is, whatever is on your launch plan that you’re planning to do? What was the result of that? And then more importantly, how do I utilize what I learned seeing the result and turn that into iteration for this product and the next product?
Cory Miller 32:29
Well, so like, let’s take Vida Bars back then, originally I wanted to push first do a subscription service. So one of the questions was, how often do we think people would, you know, need a replenishment right? Now we’re on we’re actually going to go into our in like a week or two, our fifth batch, we have four batches. Now we can go back? And look, we can say how many people were repeat customers? And what was the time period? Did they buy a first batch third best second batch, fourth batch? Or was it one, two, or you know, and looking all that and we can analyze that and make better informed data driven type decisions in the future? Oh, man, we’ve got you know, I’m making this number up. But we could say 20% of our customers are repeat customers. That’s awesome. Okay, now, are we sending them an email, you know, 90 days after their first purchase to remind them, they can come back and buy another bar. So just laying the groundwork. That’s why I say what’s the best, you know, that I think is a Chinese proverb, what’s the best time to plant a tree yesterday. And I might be butchering that again. But the that’s why you want to launch and we start accumulating data. So then you can start asking these type of questions. That’s where it gets fun. That’s where you and I love this whole game called business and eCommerce is because like, we can go back and we leave the numbers and say, how do we get a better higher score next time?
Brian Krogsgard 33:49
Yeah. How did we do? How do we do better? And what’s that growth look like? Because that’s going to fuel us to strive for more seeing seeing growth and seeing potential. Cory i think i think people are ready to rock their launch. What do you think? Wrap it up?
Cory Miller 34:04
They should, they should rock it. And they should post it in the Commerce Journey. Facebook.
Brian Krogsgard 34:08
Yeah. We’d love you all to join the Facebook group. And you can do that
Cory Miller 34:11
We want a high five.
Brian Krogsgard 34:12
Yeah, we’ll link it in the show notes. But you can also just look for Commerce Journey, search, Commerce Journey and Facebook, you’ll find the group and the page where you can like it, do all that stuff. We’d love to have you participate in that conversation with us. We’d also like to say thank you to GoDaddy Pro for being a sponsor on this episode and all episodes go to commercejourney.com/go and don’t forget to just check out everything. We have a Commerce Journey, blog posts, webinars, podcasts, and subscribe to our newsletter. That’s the meat and potatoes of how to participate in this project with us. Thanks so much for joining us and we will catch you next time.