{Launch It} 3 Tips To Surviving Your First Product Launch

I don’t know Murphy personally but he sure seems to show up when I least expect it, like a few days ago in the middle of a product launch I was supporting.

Case in point- this giant distorted Paypal button:

Doesn’t look right, does it?

I’ve only added PayPal buttons to websites hundreds of times..so why would this time be any different?

Well, turns out Murphy was right.

“When anything can go wrong, it will.”

I was a little dumbfounded as to why this particular button was acting up.

WordPress site, Paypal button..shouldn’t be too complicated, right?

I double checked the code just to make sure nothing had happened between my copy and paste and sure enough it didn’t…so what’s the deal?

I quickly turned to my BFF, Google and did a search with PayPal buttons and the Thesis theme (which this particular WordPress site was running) because I suspected that there was probably an issue with the theme.

What do you know: there’s a known issue with Thesis and PayPal buttons!

Argggh! Hair-pulling out moment. I mean, seriously?!

This was the last thing I needed right then.

It was a pretty quick fix with a line of code added to the custom.css file but all this to say is that you can plan for everything  during your launch but often it’s the things that you least expect that don’t end up working.

Are you about to embark on a product launch or thinking about one in the near future?

My advice:

Stay Cool

When things are getting sticky and you don’t seem to be moving forward: step away from the problem and give it some distance. The brain has a way of working on things even when you are not actively working on them and when you come back things are clearer and you are more likely to solve the problem! #win

Thing Big. Start Small

Especially, when it’s your first  product launch.

Product launches are super involved and have a lot of moving pieces beyond just creating the actual product. There’s the nuts and bolts involved behind the scenes from setting up your shopping cart, sales page, affiliates, and auto-responders, just to name a few. My suggestion: take that big idea you have and try to release it in smaller parts rather than taking on something huge for the first time around.

Have A Buffer

You can plan all you want but unexpected things like giant PayPal buttons can and will happen.  In your case, it might not be that exactly but it could be an unexpected delay from your graphic designer, audio missing in your video recording (<–it’s happened)and so on.

Give your product launch plan buffer to account for these last-minute glitches.

Have anything to add? Have you ever experienced something like the case of the distorted PayPal button? Let me know in the comments!

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