Your Next Product Launch Could Use a Little Rolling Thunder w/April Dunford

Speaker A: Product, uh, marketing for you. Product marketing for you. Product marketing for you. Product marketing for you.

Speaker B: April, thank you a for jumping on and welcome to another episode of the Prop Marketing podcast where, um, this season we're focusing on taking, um, a look at the macro topic of prop launches and breaking down each little core component of that. However, originally I was like, hey, there's only one person that I know, uh, well, now I know, um, that I've used resources for positioning specifically over the years, and that is yours, with the obviously awesome book and the sales pitch, uh, deck and the messaging and the positioning templates that come with it. And you just released a new, uh, revised version. We'll touch on that at the end. Um, but more importantly, the one thing we just talked about is like, hey, this is prog launches, and you have a lot of things to say. Uh, a lot of thoughts on this. You've seen probably a good chunk of this over the years. Before we get moving into, like, why positioning might be overlooked or a checkbox item that really, really messes with PMMs downstream, I'm gonna let you rock. What, what are your thoughts on launches? In the confines of, like, you've seen so much m. You've helped so many companies.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, you know, and I've done it like when I was in house, so before I was a consultant, I was in House for 25ish years. And, uh, did a lot of product launches. Lots of product launches. And, um, and some of them good, some of them not so good, to be honest. Um, and, and I think I've learned a lot about product launches. But let's. In product launches, you know, specifically, since that's kind of my wheelhouse, um, obviously we want to have tight positioning before we do a product launch. But here's the bigger question you should be thinking about is what kind of launch are you doing? So, so when, uh, what I mean by that is here's the thing that we get a lot, and we get this a lot in startups where we got a product and it's brand new, brand new. And the thing has been developed, it's brand new. And what we have in that case is a positioning thesis, because we have never sold this thing before. So what we have is a thesis. And the thesis says, this is who we think we're going to compete with, and this is what makes us different. This is the value we can deliver, no one else can. Uh, these are the kind of people that are going to love our stuff. And this is the market we're going to go win. And that's our positioning. Now you might think, okay, GA is coming up on this thing, so let's get the launch plan going. And trust me, I've done this launch and you're like, let's get it going. And we're going to do what we call the big bang launch and we're going to do whoop dee doo and we've got an event and stuff happening and all kinds of stuff. And what I have found in these cases where it's a brand new product and nobody's used it yet, and we haven't sold any of it yet, is that our thesis is generally incorrect because it was based on the best information we had available to us at the time. But when we actually launch it, then we go and sell stuff. And what we find out is we made some assumptions baked into that positioning and those assumptions are incorrect. So we thought customers would compare us to this. And then we get the thing launched and it's like, oopsie, they actually compare us to this different competitor that we weren't thinking about. Um, and we think these are our differentiating things and this is the value that we could deliver that no one else can. And then we find out, well, actually they're comparing us to this other thing. And it turns out the customers we thought that were going to love us, there's this other kind of customer. And so they value something different than what we assumed. And so there's this change in the positioning. And so then what we end up having to do is an adjustment in the positioning that happens like six months after launch or a year after launch. And everybody's sad about this because, you know, we got messaging and web pages and content and all this stuff. And here we are doing this adjustment afterwards. And uh, in my opinion, the way to get around that is to not tie launch to ga. So, you know, you got a thing, it's going to be available. What we should do is do this in stages. So what works a lot better is I've got the limited availability launch. So instead of just saying woo, now we're doing the big bang bang thing. We're going to have the thing available and we're going to go sell some and we're going to have some people go and use it. And we have this first wave of customers who, where we are essentially testing the thesis and then we test the thesis. You know, did the kind of customers we think were going to love our stuff, is that who we ended up selling to? And were they comparing us to the competitors we thought they were going to compare us to. And was the value what we thought it was going to be? And, you know, does all this stuff check out? And what we do is we surface the places where we were wrong, and now we can. Now we're ready to actually kind of dial that positioning in. It's been validated out in the market. Now we launch. And so the product has been available for six months. We just didn't make a big deal about it because we didn't know if we had the positioning right. And typically this works much better. So by the time we're actually ready to, like, do the big launch thing, um, then we actually have something that we know works. We've tested it in sales, we've tested it with customers. It's validated, and that works a lot better. So I think that is the number one mistake that people make is this idea that this theoretical positioning is going to be right when often it is not. And we should roll in there with the idea that it might be right, but we don't know how right it is. It might be 90% right, it might be 20% right. We just don't know. And so if we can delay the, you know, the big public launch thing until after we have enough customer experience to actually validate the positioning, then we're going to be sure that we're talking about the right stuff, we're launching the right stuff, and we don't have to take a pause six months later and do a little adjustment.

Speaker B: But, April, that takes too much patience to do that.

Speaker A: I know, I know. And nobody wants to do it, like, particularly your boss, right? No, it wasn't particularly your boss. Like, so you go to the CEO and the CEOs, like, you know, pants on, on fire, let's get selling this thing. It's available, uh, you know, ring the bell. Um, but I think it, it helps, like, way in advance of the launch to bake that phase in and, and explain this to people. Because most CEOs, if I gave them enough time ahead of time and explained to them the big hairy public launch is going to. Is going to happen four months later or six months later, everybody's chill. Where they're not chill is when you try to spring that on them in the last minute and say, oh, by the way, you know, I'm delaying the marketing thing until six months later. No, you just build it into the calendar, right? And so you say, okay, in the launch calendar, all these things are going to happen. And at this point, we are Ready to have customers use this thing. We are ready to have salespeople talk about it, but we are not talking about it in marketing for another, however, and then to launch, launch, marketing, launch thing that's happening at this point. Because at this point we will actually have our stuff validated and we won't end up having to launch it and then fix up all the things we screwed up.

Speaker B: I love that. And, and how is that different? Would you say that's like a soft launch and not actually a beta testing process? I would imagine, yeah.

Speaker A: Like, I mean, you can call it whatever you want, and, and if it makes your CEO feel better to call it a soft launch, man, then call it a soft launch. Like, call it whatever you want to make everybody chill out about it. But what you really, what you, uh, what you mean is, you know, like, sometimes we call it a beta launch or sometimes we call it whatever. Here's the thing that the launch of software does not need to be tied to the launch of marketing at all. And that is often something that your CEO, if you're at a startup, has never really thought about. Big companies do this all the time, right? Big companies do this all the time, where it's like, you know, I've got 17 products and they're all launching, and they've all got new stuff, and they've all got new things. Well, I'm not having 17 different launch events. I'm going to hold it and have one launch event, and it happens on this date. And that's when we go to the analysts and the press and everybody else, and that's what we're going to talk about this launch. And so cool your jets, everyone.

Speaker B: That's so, um, empowering to hear. And often it's not framed like that in a product marketer's, you know, mental mode when prepping for a launch of like, oh, I have that option. It may not always work now, I get that too. But especially earlier in your career, you're just trying to figure out what you're doing, let alone.

Speaker A: And you're going to have everybody around you pressuring you, right? Saying what's available. Oh, my God, we got to start ripping up the sales right now, right? Like, and the reality is that plus or minus a few months isn't going to kill you, man. Because, uh, like, if something happened in development and the thing was delayed by four months, they'd be telling everybody in marketing to take a jail pill, right?

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's, it's. I've been through this so many times. In my, my career, as I'm sure you have, where you've seen and felt the pressure of like, hey, we're running a, a, uh, company that's selling retail goods where the sales cycle is 30 seconds of attention span to good offer.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Where in software that is not the case oftentimes, especially if you're an enterprise motion.

Speaker A: Enterprise is, is kind of where I'm at. Right. This is different again, if you're selling consumer stuff or things like you say, you know, where somebody's got the clock going. Here's another way to think about this that um, that I think is, is a good, just philosophically good way to think about a launch. Um, and, and I got this when, you know, I worked at a bunch of startups and um, one of the first big companies I worked at was IBM. And when we did a launch plan at IBM, man, it looked nothing like my launch plans at a startup. And specifically the launch plan had multiple launches on it. And so uh, the first launch that I worked on, we had something like there were seven. Was it that many? Probably five launches within the launch. And so we had this thing, and we had this thing. And so we had, first we had something that we called pre launch, pre launch. And we could do this because we were IBM, the startup. You probably didn't do this, but we uh, had pre launch. But pre launch is when we said oh boy, it's coming. And that was it. Right? Like, it was like oh boy. And so it was when we were comfortable enough that we were close enough to having the software generally available, available that we could start talking about it at a high level. So we'd say oh boy, it's coming. And this was to whip up some demand for the thing before we launched it. So we'd say, oh boy, it's coming. Here it is. It's got these things, uh, whoa, it's going to be great, you know. And we would brief the analysts and we do a little bit of PR on it. Not too much because we don't want to steal the thunder from later launches. But there was always a pre launch. And the pre launch was to whip up the excitement among the people that were the most interested to buy this thing when it finally came out and it mess up your competition, hey, this thing is coming. And whoops, everybody else is looking at. If you're currently in a sales process looking at our competitor, you should be hitting the pause button on that because this thing is coming, people. So we, so first we do that. We never do a launch without pre launch, there'd be pre launch. Pre launch was the first thing. Then there was the actual launch day, which was the day that marketing is ready to talk about it. In between there in the middle, there might be the product availability, but we didn't give a crap about that in marketing. We were like, make it available whenever you want as long as our launch is a good four or five months after that. So there's pre launch and then the actual launch. We would often have an event. We'd bring a bunch of customers together, we'd have the PR happening, la la la, all this stuff. But that was just a day, right? So we have the day Yahoo, it's here, come and buy it from us. That's amazing. So that was launch. Three months later, we would do something called a momentum launch. And so momentum launch was, let's go out and talk about how awesomely successful the launch has been. So we would come out three months later and say, man, we can't stock the shelves. It's flying off, everything's going great. And so we would list the customers we have. So at launch, we usually had a few customers we talk about, but we keep a bunch in our back pocket for momentum launch. So then we do momentum launch. So we're back out there in the market three months later saying, it's killing here. Like, we have all these people doing this stuff. We talk about a bunch of metrics over this many people have transacted this many times doing this many things. That was the momentum launch. Um, so we do that. Then often three months or so later, um, we would do what we would call like a follow on launch or a point release launch. And that was usually announcing something that we couldn't announce back then, but that people were angry about. So they were like, dude, you don't have support for whatever. And we're like, it's coming. So then we would do another launch on that and we'd say, oh, finally it's here. We have support for blah, blah. And oh my God. And then we talk about a few more customers or whatever, whatever, whatever. And then we would usually follow that with some other thing. Now, the other thing was usually, um, custom to the product that we were looking at. So for example, um, but it looked a lot like a momentum launch, basically. So we would have another launch saying, you know, oh my God, look at all the cool stuff we've done. Look at all the progress we've made, look at all the whatever. And sometimes we would, because we'd be almost a year out by then we would pre, pre launch something. So we would be tilting a little bit at, oh, by the way, here's some things on the roadmap. And people would say, well, when's that coming? Oh my God. We'll say, we don't know, but ask us again in three months. Ha ha. And then it would start all over again the following year with the next thing. So if you think about launch as being. And we had a term for this, we called it the Rolling Thunder.

Speaker B: I love that. That's so it's.

Speaker A: And once you've done it once you're like, okay, launch day is bullshit. Like, uh, like, who cares what happens on launch day? What really happens is this. And the whole idea was, how do we have an excuse to keep talking about this for a year? And let's just bake it into the plan. Because, like, let's face it, one day doesn't get you anything, right? What we actually want is a, is a press plan for a year, a PR communications plan for a year. And so we would do this like Rolly Thunder thing. And so once I saw that, I don't think I ever ran a launch that didn't look like that after that, like, even in my own personal life, like when I was, uh, doing my first version of my book, I had a Rolling Thunder launch plan where there was the pre, pre launch, the pre launch, the launch, the whatever, the whatever. Three months later, you got the audiobook, there was a, you know, and it was great.

Speaker B: I remember that. And you even did that with, uh, the news version.

Speaker A: If you can, if you can plan it like that and then communicate it like that to your executive team, then it really takes the pressure off what happened in that one day. Because let's be serious, the one day is not. It's neither, uh, here nor there, right? Like, we want to do a good job on the one day, but if we, if we're all sitting around and all we're ever going to measure the success of the launch on is the metrics we had on that one day, like, heaven help us, right? Uh, so if we could think about it as more of a process that spans over a long period of time, decouple software release from what we're doing in marketing, then I think our chances of, you know, having sustained a sustained message and presence in the market around a new thing that's happening, our chances of being able to do that successfully go way up.

Speaker B: I would say that also relieves the pressure of having all these assets created on launch day. When it. Like, honestly, realistically, case studies are getting increasingly harder to grab with logo recognition. Um, use cases are maybe baked if you're not going the Rolling Thunder route. Um, and you're learning, like, okay, why isn't sales rolling in a week after. Well, our sales cycle is three months at least. So, like, you tell me. Um, but this. I love it. I'm gonna steal it. I'm gonna take it, I'm gonna reframe it.

Speaker A: Everyone should do a launch like this. Like, honestly, I don't know why people don't. And they. And yeah, and it works for anything. Like, I say, I did it with the book, right? Where I was like, you know, when I was looking at the book, like, to be honest, when I first wrote the book, they were asking me, are you gonna do an audiobook? And I was like, I don't actually think I'm gonna sell that many books. And doing an audiobook's a pain in the ass. Right? Like, I gotta go to the studio and talk till my throat dries up for I don't know how many hours. And I said, you know what? I'm just gonna hold the audiobook and I'm going to wait and see if the book sells. Okay, Then I'll do it. And. But at the back of my mind, I was thinking, it's a point launch. So three months later, when everyone's not talking about my book anymore, I can show up and say, hey, popular demand. Here's the book, here's the audiobook. And it worked out perfect, except for, you know, in that little gap in the middle, people were sending me hate mail. Like, people were so mad. There wasn't an audiobook, like, so bad. Oh, my gosh. I was getting these emails, and they were like, what have you got against the dyslexics?

Speaker B: You know, the accessibility route. Wow.

Speaker A: Um, I was like, my son's dyslexic. I just didn't think anybody wanted to hear this book, to be honest. But then I put the audiobook out, and everybody was happy. And, you know, and so it was just another thing, another excuse for me to be back out talking about, hey, here's a new thing. Here's a thing that's happened. You know, like, same thing with the book I just put out. I just did a new version of the old book, like a expanded, um, uh, revised edition. But same thing. You know, I announced the expanded revised edition, but, oh, no, the templates aren't ready for that yet. You know, so the templates are going to come A little bit later. And then it gives you an excuse to say, okay, the templates are out now. And then the people that didn't notice that you launched it two, three months ago are like, what templates? What, what? I didn't even know. Because the reality is you're only going to reach so many people on launch day. And so you got to like, launch it, launch it again, launch it again, launch it again.

Speaker B: And, uh, I remember the email hitting from the list announcing the revised edition. I was so giddy, I was so happy. And so instantly it was like, yes, here we go. And, uh, I was just using the templates. Uh, I'm, um, five, six weeks into a new job.

Speaker A: It's fun in a way. A version two is fun, right? Because, you know, the thing is already good and it's not a complete, you know, it's launching version one of a new product. You need to be really careful.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: And that's where I think this, you know, getting your positioning, but treating that positioning like it's a thesis is really important on a version one product. Because you just don't know, man. You don't know if it's. You don't know if it's going to work the way you think it's going to work at all. And you should in fact roll into the. With the idea that we have a thesis, but it's wrong somewhere. And so we need to work the kinks out of it first before we go blow our brains and our budget on a, uh, big launch that is expensive and costs a lot of money and whatever, whatever. And then, you know, and then we gotta go back and say, oopsie, now we're changing it. Like, yeah.

Speaker B: And then how, how often were you checking in and updating your core docs as you learn through that process?

Speaker A: Well, so in all the launches I did where we had, you know, we had a wave of customers go through before we went and did the actual launch launch, we didn't have anything right. So the idea is we haven't launched yet. We might have done this little teaser launch or a pre launch to say, ooh, it's coming, but we don't have anything out. So that's one of the great things about it, is that I don't have a bunch of stuff out that I now have to go and change and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, we're holding on, building the content and figuring out what the website's going to look like and figuring all that. We, maybe we got a draft Thing we're working on. Um, but we're not building any of that stuff until we validated that the positioning works. Now, the reality is positioning is not a static thing. Right. So even though you could do a really good job in that I've got a first wave of customers, I feel pretty good about the positioning now. We're going to do the big launch launch. Anything could happen, right. Like the next day your big competitor could announce an acquisition or something could happen, or Covid hits or who know knows what. That throws all the cards up in the air. But you're probably good for a while. You're probably good for six months. If you've done your job right in the testing phase of this thing, you're probably good for at least six months. But I would definitely, what I always did was have a thing six months out on the calendar for us to check in on the positioning and look at it and say, okay, has anything changed? Like, are we still seeing the same competitors we thought we were going to see? Are we seeing the same differentiated capabilities? Is it the same kind of customers we're selling to? If it is, great, and we just keep running with the positioning we've got, if it's changing or we see something that we didn't expect, then we are like pause game. We just need to go back, revalidate the positioning, make sure it's good, and then we'll do an update on it then and that'll be true way forever. That's not a launch thing, that's a look at it forever kind of a thing.

Speaker B: It's an evergreen, always should be. And if it's not, then you're going to get yourself in some pretty big trouble.

Speaker A: Tech, everything's changing. Like our product's changing, the market's changing, your competitors are changing. You know, three years ago nobody was talking about Vibe anything. Right. And now that's not. Now we can't talk about anything else.

Speaker B: No, we were, we're stuck with post Covid blues. And now AI is wrecking more havoc arguably on the tech industry.

Speaker A: Yeah. So it's, you know, we cannot, you know, we need to be in a, um, in a mode where there is a regular check in on our positioning so that we can look at it and say, okay, does it need to change? This is another reason why, speaking of Vibe stuff, like, it's another reason why, you know, we should try to use some kind of a process to build the positioning in the first place. Because if we didn't have sort of a process to build it then when we go to check in on it, uh, you know, we don't know whether it's good or bad. So if we built it with a process, then we can go back to the process and say, okay, so if you built it with my process, right. My process starts with competitive alternatives. And we check in, we say competitive return. Did that change? Because if it did, maybe the downstream stuff changes or differentiated capabilities. Maybe the competitors are the same. But they caught up to us. Oh, they caught up to us. Oh. Does that actually impact our value? If it does, well then we need to go back to the drawing board on value. Sometimes what you've got is there's a product, and this happens a lot where the positioning is kind of obvious. Like, you know, you got a thing, it's in the market, it's obvious what it does. It uh, it's obvious what the value is. It's obvious what it competes with. I don't need to do some big, you know, I don't need to get a whole bunch of people together in a room and figure it out. You know, like it's just obvious. There's nothing else it could be. The problem is that later on if things shift and it's not so obvious, then it might be hard for you to even recognize that it needs to shift. And then if you do recognize it needs to shift, how are you going to do it? Because you never used a process to build it in the first place. So it helps to kind of have some kind of, you know, whatever, you know, pick your poison on a process for doing it. But it helps to have a process for doing it. So that one, you have a way of assessing whether or not it needs to change. And then two, if it does need to change, you know how to get it done.

Speaker B: I always like to think about the process of like even IKEA furniture comes with, with instructions, albeit, albeit questionable. But there's still a guide to make you angry. At least have that in place to keep you at least, you know, guard railed. Uh, I just obvious. I've, I just did cabinets for my kids playroom and so that's fresh on the mind of like it's awful. Anyways, I, uh, digress.

Speaker A: Do you know what gets me on the IKEA thing though? Like, like there's. There's this promise there, right, that is going to be really easy to put together and there's this promise that it comes with everything you need. And occasionally I buy an IKEA thing there and they'll just throw in a, hey, you Need a screwdriver for this. And I'm like, no, no, you are breaking a contract with me, man.

Speaker B: I. I always end up with more. More parts, uh, out of the box.

Speaker A: That's good. I like that y.

Speaker B: It falls apart later. But that's. That's probably a me thing. Um, April, I've gotten way more out of this than I was even hoping for, which is saying a lot beside high expectations. Thank you for being so generous and gracious dropping by. I know you're busy doing a lot of things. Um, for those who. Of, um, obviously awesome come out, I'll leave the. The link for that in the comments in the section of the notes for this show. Where else are you running around these days?

Speaker A: Yeah, well, so, yeah, new version of the book is out. And so if you had the first version of the book, I mean, it's not a whole new book, so, you know, the first version might be okay. But I did. I, uh, did update and expand a bunch of things. Like, one thing is I didn't talk too much about what happens when you have multiple products in a company. And so I added a big section on that because I got all kinds of questions on that. Um, there's a section in there on differentiated value. And I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that the first time around, but I think I was thinking it was easy and everybody knew how to do this. And let me tell you, my inbox says different. Like, uh, people were sending me all kinds of emails on that, so I rewrote it. I restructured a little bit the stuff you need to do before you start a positioning exercise, because I think I'm smarter about that myself now. Like, what decisions do you need to make? What is the prep you need to do to ensure that you're going to be successful when you go in? And so I updated all that and then a bunch of stuff afterwards on what do you do after? So if that sounds interesting, then maybe you want to do the new version of the book, which is available wherever you get books, including an audio version you learned.

Speaker B: You learned.

Speaker A: Released at the same time, so that nobody could accuse me of being against the dyslexics. But, um, so there's that. And then, you know, I, uh, I put out sort of a limited edition podcast to go with it. It's like five or six episodes that dive down on some of the new stuff in the. So if you want a Cliff Snow's version of new book, you could do that. It's called Positioning with April Dunford. So creative. Um, so aprildenford.com if you go there, you can see the links to the podcast. I have a newsletter too, which I'm kind of a lazy newsletter writer, but, like, whenever I have something I think is important, I'm working on this really long. I'm working on two really long articles about. One about differentiated value and one about positioning in an age of AI and what do you need to worry about? And God knows when I'll ever publish them because they just get bigger and bigger. But at some point, I'll hit publish on those. And so if you're subscribed to the newsletter, uh, you'll get those. And if you subscribe to the newsletter, you get the templates, man. People like templates.

Speaker B: That's it. People love those. Uh, I've been using those this week actually, and it's lovely. It's wonderful. Especially now I'm m working with a multi product, uh, setup here, and it's helped.

Speaker A: So thank you. Multi product is a hard. There's a lot of hard things to think about.

Speaker B: It's not a blink and hope for the best, and it's done. It's definitely a process. April, thank you. Thank you again. This has been awesome.

Speaker A: Yeah. Thank you.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And for those of you who are still listening, spend another episode of Product Marketing for you, uh, with my pal April. Enjoy, and we'll catch you on the next episode.