How quickly should I launch a product?

Hello, my name is Ian Peterman, CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm. And on this episode, I'm gonna talk about how long it takes to launch a product and how quickly should you launch a product. So those are 2 separate questions. Obviously, the question of how quickly can you will allow you to determine if you should. if you can do it as quickly as you want, but whether you should or not is a different question. So first, you know, the speed at which you can design and develop and launch a product really depends on the product, and that is a huge variable. I've worked on products where we could launch it in 3 months, or it's taken 18 months in order to actually launch the product. If we're talking about start to finish, from the time somebody had an idea and decided to actually invest money in it to the time that it was launched and in a consumer's hand. So when you're deciding how quickly you should launch, because you can always accelerate projects that normally take 12 months, you can make it happen in possibly 6. With the right team, with the right amount of money, you can accelerate things. So something that I get asked fairly often is, how quickly should I? So when you're looking at your product, you want to look at a few different things. How quickly you should do it will depend on what the product is, who you are marketing to, and where are you at right now? Are you a large established company? Do you have a large user base? Do you have a lot of people who love you and will buy your product immediately? Or what's the competition look like? So one of the first factors is understanding that we look at with our clients is what does the competitive landscape look like? Do you have— do you know if there's products coming out? Are there competitors launching products already? Has one just launched? Things like this will mean that you probably should accelerate launching, not to the point where you damage the product or decrease the quality of the product development process, but if you're trying to enter a market and you see that there are multiple products being launched, you do want to make sure that you are getting in because it usually means that there is a market, people are purchasing, there is a need. And when you have multiple companies launching similar products into the same market, it can— they can help actually feed each other and grow a segment, especially if it's a new segment. You'll see that, you know, we just saw that with streaming. So, you know, Netflix has been doing it for a long time, and then all of a sudden, you know, they've basically proven the market. And now Disney and a lot of other companies have all jumped in and are now offering their own streaming— HBO, for example, and, and others. And so now there's also a lot because it's a known— it's been proven, and now everybody's kind of like, okay, all at the same time. And it all just happened at around the same time, the same 12 months. We've gotten quite a few new streaming options. And so you'll find that often when you're launching a product, and first to market has its benefits. You know, being the first means you may capture the first early adopters. You will have kind of the attention of media if you can work that side of things really well. You have the attention of the media solely to yourself. you know, there's— you don't have any competition in your segment. But that also comes with risks, right? It's— if it's a new market, maybe it's going to be a flop. Maybe there isn't an actual market for it. You're trying to see if there's something there. So there's risks that are associated with that. And, you know, you're also going to be first, so everyone's going to look at your stuff and then they're going to compare it to the next. And if you're Only okay, then you're going to lose all your customers immediately because the second person is your only competitor. There isn't, you know, 4 options to go through where you might be in the middle of a pack. You're either— when you only have a second one come in, you are either top or bottom. There's no, there's no middle. There's no third to make it so you have different third option to make it so there's a middle of pack at all. So You want to look at what's going to make sense for your product and your customers. You also want to be looking at, you know, what is going to make sense. Is this— is it a time-based product where it's something that, you know, things that are, you know, based on current fashion trends or a little more trend— they're more trend-based. You don't have the luxury of waiting 12 months to design, develop, and launch it. You know, you could have a training program even, or something that's really specific towards an event that's happening now. So you want to make sure, okay, well, the event's happening now. And if it's unknown, you know, it's like pandemic happened, everything started shifting. Nobody knew exactly how long it's gonna last and we're still in it technically. Right? And we gave rise to this whole industry of mask making. Right off the bat, of course, people jumped into it, but there's also some hesitancy of, well, is it going to last long enough to be worth it? And a few months in, you saw a lot of companies really getting on. We are making masks. We're adding masks to our product line. We're adding to our product line. We're adding this extra product of masks. We're making new masks, we're making new kind of filtering, we're making even safer masks, we're making nanoparticle filters and different, you know, the list goes on and on. And now there's a huge amount of innovation. And when the pandemic ends, they probably won't fully go away. You know, mask wearing is something that's done in other countries. People that have flu and things even wear them. So it's not something that Will completely go away, but there's a window of opportunity, so to speak, in, in a new market. When a new market emerges and it's not going to last, you know, there's going to be, be only a set amount of time where it's available, then you need to be on it as quickly as possible. And that means paying some more money, accelerate your development process. Don't cut the corners. unless you really can and your product isn't gonna suffer, but get it out as quickly as possible. Other things, so like when I— we've talked about it in a previous episode about how risk of regulation change. If you have a risk of regulation change, you probably wanna actually hold and just allow the regulation change to work. If you want it, basically you wanna save some money have to develop your product twice in order to accommodate the new regulations. Wait for that to come out and then develop product. And that's the case across many industries. You know, automotive, highly regulated. Food, drug, medical, anything touching the FDA, highly regulated. Definitely have to follow their rules. It's not even an option. Huge fines if you don't. So you want to do things that follow those regulations. So if you're aware of regulations going to change, don't be in a rush. Be okay with waiting. You know, your, your investors may not like it as much, but they will like saving money. So that's, you know, a bit of a cost, cost-benefit analysis that you need to do of whether it's worth waiting to see or whether you need to develop it because, you know, the The cost of the money is actually so high that it's not worth waiting. So there's a lot of factors that go into that, but that's something to be aware of that can help determine how quickly you should launch your product. And the other— the last part that I want to talk about is your user base. So you have— if you have a large user base and you can quickly launch, you should launch. You should make it Brief, if you already have dedicated people that are willing to purchase, you know, you have those, you're Apple, you don't have to wait around. You can just launch it. You can develop it, have whispers about it, launch the product, and you're going to sell. You know, you're going to sell. You don't have to do a huge marketing campaign buildup because people already know, like, and trust and will buy your product guaranteed. If you are not Apple or anybody else that has really good base of customers, then you may need to spend 6 months advertising and you may need to spend longer. You may need to do 9 months of campaigning to help grow the user base or grow interest until you get to a number where you're actually comfortable launching. And so that can actually impact your launch date if you go, okay, well, yeah, development only took 3 months. It was great. But do we actually want to launch because we don't have enough people? We don't— we're not going to make a big enough splash, right? So part of it is, well, if only 3 people buy it, yeah, they love it, they're going to be amazing, they're going to tell all their friends, but only 3 people are going to buy it. Then maybe you do some more campaigning. Maybe you say, oh, our launch date is 3 months out after we finish developing it, and we're going to grow from there. And so And that's where, you know, crowdfunding campaigns and things like that can all help with. And there, that kind of approach will also maybe stretch out what your launch time is, what the launch process is, because your development process may say, oh, you could launch in 3 months, but marketing says we want a 6-month runway because we need to do the campaign and we need to share with enough people and we won't hit that critical number until month 6, and that's when we launch, when we have the right amount or right season. And that, you know, season is also part of it. If you have a product that's summer-based, launching in the middle of December is probably not the right time. So, you know, maybe you thought of it the year— I mean, you started it the year before, maybe you started development in the beginning of summer, but it took 3 months, and so it's the end of summer. launching a product, then yeah, you could do a soft launch, but your real push isn't going to be until spring the next year when people start thinking about summer again and will really care about your product. So there's a lot of things to keep in mind and be aware of that your launch time, your time from when you start to when you launch the product, isn't always the same time it is for actually developing and saying, okay, well, we can, we can put the product out right now. But maybe you want to wait a little bit. So hopefully it gives you a good idea and answers some questions about how quickly you should launch, how do you decide when you should launch the product, and how it relates to product development process. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you wanna learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description. And of course, we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.