Our Pre-Launch Story

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Our pre-launch campaign plays a significant role in our launch process - the better the pre-launch hype, the better the launch. Pre-launches are however tricky areas, if the product is still under development/testing when the campaign begins.

We know that we have to play with some extremely important mental triggers to get the kind of attention that we want. Our greatest challenge was to build a feeling of scarcity - because our product is free and available for the mass market. Our business model was to give access to the product for free so that adoption could spread via word of mouth. We get prospects visiting and using our site that we can later market specific services to; whereas they get a great website for their events. Its a win-win.

Our marketing strategy was to attract early adopters through delivery of good quality content through blogs - these early adopters will later lead the masses into using our products and are thus very important for our business. Our revenue model is to attract commercial event promoters and planners who would take up our ticketing & merchandising modules earning us a small percentage of all tickets & merchandising sold off their pages.

Building a launch story around this model that can instill a sense of value for the application is our next step. In our prelaunch phase, we also want to create a sense of scarcity and exclusivity at the same time that will prompt them to visit and join as soon as we launch.

In our case, it wasn’t that easy to create a story, considering the fact that we didn’t have a product to show and no social proof to help ease prospects. Yet, we had to get strangers to give up their names and email addresses to get on a queue to use it. Perhaps the toughest part of the prelaunch process. We’ve thought of adding dramatic videos in the hype phase to build a sense of anticipation, all the while touching upon some basic functionality details. Since the idea is to attract early adopters, we started to engage them in conversation and brought them into our launch process. The more engaged they are, the better it is for us - after all, these 100 or so people are going to be our beta level product users…

This post has been included in our “Event Launch Guidelines” training program. Click for more information.