Ideas & Concepts: Announce a New Site or Risk Someone Stealing Your Idea

Ok guys what are your thoughts on the costs and benefits of these to different approaches of launching a new product.

1. Get a blog and tell the world about your new product before it's out to build buzz and anticipation. But you risk someone else trying to recreate your idea and race you to launch or tip off competitors.

2. Keep it secret until launch until it's too late for copy cats and competitors? Ensuring that you slip under the radar?

SSM

No I know that people have already thought of it. That's why I said competitors and copy cats. There are already some sites out there that are doing what we will be doing but we don't necessarily want to alert them and let them know we plan on kicking in their door and looting the place.

However, there could be huge benefits to promoting it before launch. You could have 500 registered users at launch instead of waiting 4 or 5 weeks to get the same result.

The idea may not change the world but even in a niche market news could travel fast and alert established comp and make them step up their game.

Their are a lot of start ups that use this model. The start a blog about their upcoming service and sign people up for their beta or newsletter so that at launch they already have a foundation of users to propel the service forward instead of waiting for the new users to trickle in and to gain momentum.

Just do whatever suits you. I really doubt that it is a seriously original idea.

I had what I thought was a brilliant idea for a new site tracking tool but a couple of days after I'd written up a plan I came across almost the exact idea at another site - sure it was myspace-level ugly but it was established 2 years ago and already has 2,000,000 sites tracked.

As Apple shows it is the UI that matters these days, so I'll probably still go ahead with it if I get some time.

Other people have had exactly the same idea that you have, no matter how original you think it is. Don't worry about it, your implementation will be different so if you think you can do it better go get started!

I still think it doesn't really make much of a difference. I generally keep my thoughts and plans to myself and a few conversations with friends. Then after you launch (with only your mates knowing about it) you can start your promotion. 400-500 people on a list is an okay start, but you can easily reach that many people if you invite a few big name bloggers for the first look and a public review of the site.

If you are going to do a pre-launch hype promo maybe just make sure you don't talk about all of your features, or only talk about the ones that would take serious effort to duplicate. If you have something that might be duplicated easily or is very important to you, do a Steve Jobs and talk about a bunch of lame/expected features for a while and then leave a few features 'top secret' until a month before your launch.

At the end of the day I don't think you can say one way or the other is better, it is all totally dependent on your site, product or service isn't it? Look at the positives and negatives from your perspective and weigh it up.

Why would you not deliver. If you didn't deliver they would just forget about you and you would slip into oblivion. There's no trouble to get into.

From what I've read from other successful web startups was that their prelaunch following and foundation of users were essential to their success.

I think building up a critical mass of users is essential to a web startup. Think of this way.

Say conservatively you get 500 people to sign up and as soon as your site launches they tell some friends which generates an additional 250 .

Then you announce your news to all of the popular bloggers and over the next two months they bring in another 1,000 + users.

Your total is now let's say 1,750.

Now what if you solely relied on the after launch announcement to the bloggers. You get 1,000 + but it takes 2 months to reach that amount.

With the prelaunch following you had an immediate 500 users at launch and after two months had an additional 1,750. I know these are all predictions but they are based on logical thinking.

now let's say that 50% of the total users actual convert and they each spend $15.

1,750 / 2 = 875 x 15 = $13,125

1,000 / 2 = 500 x 15 = $7,500

That's a huge difference in the amount of money that will make in just the first 2 months. If the two growths rates were continued that would create a huge contrast in the total amount of revenue for the business.

The thing is all of that may be true but it doesn't hurt to have that extra traffic, users, and buzz. Even if only a marginal amount convert it still users and buzz you may not have had otherwise.

On top of that it doesn't take a lot of effort to setup an opt in beta newsletter.

Secondly, if you are going to fail you're going to fail anyway so what does it matter if you have more buzz? You might as well get as many people as you can and prepare and plan as if you are going to succeed. And if you are succesful as you have planned those extra users will create more income.

Surprisingly, getting TechCrunch's "wink" isn't that hard if you network yourself. I forwarded "DoTheRightThing" to Mike yesterday, which caused their site to crash.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/27/do-the-smug-thing/

Make sure you can handle the traffic before getting on TechCrunch.

True, but who is generating that hype? If you're the one touting it to be the -killer, then you fail to deliver then you rightfully deserve humiliation. However, if it's the umpteen 'experts' who are prognosticating on what your product is supposed/going to do to its competitors, then you're really not at fault. You should however, do what you can to set the expectations.

In the case of Zune, I don't think Microsoft ever out and out stated that they were there to destroy iPod's market share in 3-6 months. That said, I think they did a poor job of managing expectations.

Great discussion guys,

Posted By: Travis

9 times out of 10, the best online products/services I've used were found either by accident or recommended by a friend.

If your product is great, it'll find people, people won't have to find it.

I totally agree with this one. If you make a product worth talking about it really isn't going to matter if you get another 500 pre-launch hits.

But letutor also has a good point, a newsletter signup page only takes an hour if that to make - so it's hardly a problem if it goes nowhere. The worst thing is seeing a product that is coming soon after clicking on the developers homepage and not being able to sign up for a reminder once it is launched. If you have a splash homepage without a signup form you are killing yourself.