(2009-03-15) Ries When Launch

Eric Ries says Don't combine your Start Up Product Launch with a Marketing Launch. Do your Product Launch first. (Do your Marketing Launch later. He gives conditions for doing the Marketing Launch.) Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't Marketing Launch (until you pass his tests). (Customer Development)

Related interview

• For a big fancy launch you can get hundreds of thousands of customers to show up for one day. But for metrics analysis (A-B Test), generally a cohort of 100 people or 1,000 people are plenty to learn from.

Hmm, in my experience, short/generic ad terms are very expense (more than $5/click), and longer unique terms get almost 0 views, resulting in really-almost-0 clicks, resulting in 0 sales.