It’s so exciting! You have a few customers or users and your product is off the ground! A startup finally gets momentum. Customers are increasing in number. It’s hard not to relax, have a beer, and bask in the glory of a newly released product. However, this is only the beginning.
So many startups that make it through the early, treacherous waters of launch end up foundering at the discipline required to operate continuously. More and more of the venture’s activity migrates out of the direct sight lines of the founding team. During this stage of a company, it’s important to keep the hunger and enthusiasm that was there at the beginning. Easing up now could diminish all of the hard work put in.
Now the team has to grow and fully develop the product. Technology changes every day, and startups have to keep up with customer demands and head off emerging competition. Startups can’t allow service interruptions. Ensuring that monitoring is in place and that the process for responding to alerts always works are tasks that torment a shockingly high number of startups at this phase. This is where the team often gets so busy that they forget to “be the customer” and use their own service with fresh eyes from time to time. This can result in embarrassingly basic oversights on customer experience.
The Chesapeake Bay founders learned the hard way that you cannot relax once the product launches. Early on, they secured distribution in Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, and about 3,000 boutiques. It sounds great, but Mei Xu knew she needed a big box merchandiser to be really successful.
It took her over a year of calling the buyer at Target every week to get a meeting. For that meeting, Xu innovated new colors and fragrances specifically to address the needs of the Target customer. At that meeting, she secured a contract that would require building a new factory in China, finding new distributors, and putting an inventory management system in place. Xu never expected to walk out of her first meeting at Target with a $3 million contract. She says, “I was completely caught off guard.” Instead of being able to bask in this accomplishment, Xu quickly had to build the capabilities needed to complete this contract. That meant building a factory, making the candles, and importing them back to the United States in time for the upcoming shopping rush. She did and Target turned into an $8 million annual customer—that’s a lot of $10 candles.
Notice that Chesapeake Bay Candle innovated the product after it was launched. So too will most startups. Products need constant innovation and evolution. The development plan and process has to account for future innovations. Planning for those changes gives a startup the ability to take a longer-term view. For example, most new pharmaceutical products have a development plan to take the product from launch through the entire patent life—on average, that’s a twelve-year planning horizon.
Check out the product evolution for Nespresso coffee machines. They launched the product in 1986. More than 30 years later, their product lineup includes nearly one machine for every year they’ve been in business. The early evolution was most likely to fix problems that they encountered. Later evolution was to better meet customers’ needs. And by the way, it took Nespresso nearly a decade to hit financial breakeven.
So, congrats on getting your new product off the ground. Now make sure that you’ve mapped out how that product will evolve over time. Then get some customer usage data and check that your ideas are right.