Product-Market Fit validation is a critical step to ensure a successful launch and avoid losses.

While Qualitative Research, CustDev programs and early UX tests allow product managers to test hypotheses and pre-validate the product's value proposition, it is far not enough to confidently say that a new venture is going to be successful without real market feedback. The Soft-Launch approach comes into help.

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What Soft launch exactly is?

It is a live market test prepared and done in the shortest possible period at the lowest possible cost when all conditions are as close as possible to the actual market circumstances.

Your product or service is offered to the actual target audience via sales and marketing channels. The customer experience, interfaces, and communications are similar to those that will be in place at and after the full-scale launch.

The soft-launched product could be at an even earlier stage of development than an MVP. We'd say that Soft-launch is a way to define an MVP's requirements.

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What is a proper Soft launch?

The crucial objective of a Soft-Launch is to get comprehensive data that would allow your team to take a confident decision on how to launch and market your product. Data, metrics, decision criteria are different for every unique case.

In most cases, the product owner's expertise, gut feel and entrepreneurial flair will play a huge role, but proper data from the soft launch would help to reduce the risks of mistakes and losses.

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How to design and run an effective Soft launch?

The final structure and pipeline are unique for every case, but principles and its elements are quite common. Here are the key things we always do in preparation of soft-launch programms:

Describe your Goals, Objectives & Expectations

First, understand what you want to achieve from the in-market test and how you will measure its efficiency. What questions do you want to answer? At least the following:

• Validate a Product-Market fit
• Test your Product Value Proposition & Offers
• Test Marketing, Lead Generation funnels performance and Conversion Rates
• Evaluate the Customer Acquisition Cost
• Test your product's UX performance throughout the funnel

Define the Target Market

Customer pool, Target Audience and its Core. Describe the Use Case and particular Job Stories to understand your target customer's needs, problems and the context they're trying to find the solution.

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Develop your Offer: Value Proposition & its Pitch

Use frameworks to set the structure: describe all the benefits, competitive advantages, conditions and offerings.

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Pre-validate your Offers via Qualitative Research

Customer, Expert interviews and Corridor Studies will help you make sure the offer sounds clear to your audience, addresses their needs, and meets expectations.

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Describe & design your business process

To make your test truthful and representative, it requires setting up the whole Marketing –> Sales –> Onboarding –> Customer Support pipeline the way it is supposed to work later on.

If you miss this and cover only the marketing and sales part, then the chances your product or service won't work well enough to deliver the promised value and retain the customer.

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Design & Develop the full User Acquistion funnel

All the marketing, sales, communication and support assets and infrastructure should be in place. Luckliy we live in times of No- & Low-code solutions that would allow to build everythin in days at no huge costs.

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Define the actions and metrics to track, setup your analytics

Enrich your funnel with key metrics and setup all the tech to gather data, create simple dashboards.

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Start the campaign

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