How to Bounce Back After a Failed Product Launch
Working hard and anticipating success doesn’t always mean we are going to achieve it. Unfortunately, many technology entrepreneurs have burned the candle at both ends and fired up their midnight oil, just to see their new product fail tremendously – it’s a part of life.
You can find comfort in the fact that many of the largest companies out there have unleashed product after product just to have them thrown back at them; think about Coca Cola’s disaster with New Coke back in the 80’s, for example.
Here is how you can pick yourself up again and learn from your mistakes, making strategy and discipline a part of your new recipe for success.
Step 1: Dissect your data
The great thing about failure is that, by learning from them, your chances of success are so much higher. So many of our famous thinkers, celebrated authors, and filthy-rich business owners have produced ideas and products that were an absolute failure. The market rejected them, and they lost their good reputation – yet, they somehow managed to bounce back from it without much delay.
Start by analyzing every piece of data from your product launch. Use Google Analytics, for example, or invest in a more comprehensive software test management to get the full picture. It’s important to start by doing this as it’s not necessarily your product that is the problem as much as the journey towards the launch.
Investigate the bounce rate of your website and identify its weakest points; at some point, the visitors to your site turned around and decided against what you had to offer.
Improve the weakest sites and retain the traffic you need to make the next product a success
Step 2: Customer feedback
Perhaps the most important step, getting in touch with your customers can clarify where it all went wrong. This is usually important no matter what the outcome of your launch was; engage with your market, and they’ll tell you the truth.
This can be as complicated as making use of a visual visitor to identify the traffic on your website – or as simple as sending out a survey to your email list. No matter how you choose to go about it, the questions should be the same; what they disliked about the product, how it can be improved, what they liked about it, as well as what they tried to use it for.
It’s a good idea to offer them some sort of benefit by helping you out, such as a discount on other products or services. Every piece of feedback you get will help to form a complete picture of what your market thought about your product – and what you can do to make them fall in love with your next one.
Step 3: Revamp and reconnect
Now that you have dissected your data and gathered information from your customers, it’s time to get back to the drawing table. Implement the changes, improve your website, and reconnect with your market when you’re ready to unleash the new and improved product.
It’s important to continue to ask them for feedback at this stage, as you need to show them the changes you’ve made – and understand if it is sufficient.
Hopefully, the feedback will be positive, and you’ve learned a bunch of useful things about your company as well as your market. Understand it, use it, and make a success out of the next launch.