#5 ways Entrepreneurs can Launch The Right Product in Right Time Test-selling helps entrepreneurs learn about the sales cycle

By Baishali Mukherjee

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

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A Plethora of new products is launched every day, while only a few get enough footing to be considered "doing well'. If you are going to launch new products anytime soon, you need to test market demand early to know if your idea is a winner. But how?

The experts have answers-

Throughout his career, Anshul Gupta, Founder & Director of Razr Media, has helped launch a dozen successful software products. He has learned powerful techniques that entrepreneurs use in order to find out whether their products will be successful — before they launch their products.

Find a Serious Problem to Solve

"Before you spend a dime on development, interact with 10-15 prospective customers to comprehend the problem you are solving. Do this is before you tell them the details like features, pricing, or how the thing going to change their lives for better," advised Gupta.

These according to Gupta are "problem discovery" interactions, and are intended to not only meticulously understand the problems, but also to learn if the issue is worth solving as well.

Business is all About Selling

Often entrepreneurs launch products and eventually wonder on the anaemic sales. Gupta feels, knowing how to sell products in a number of ways, is more important than the product itself. "We are actually validating sales, and not just validating the product," he clarifies, and adds, "Try and test-sell your product to at least 15 consumers. It is not essential to have a fully operational product to gauze whether people will buy it. In fact, early test sales should be from a rough prototype,"

Test-selling helps you learn about the sales cycle, if the target customer is the actual decision-maker, whether they possess the budget to buy, this in turns aids you to redefine your pricing.

Customer Acquisition Costs are Vital

Chandra Sekhar Rout, Founder of Lokate, an app that makes any car a connected car, considers it common for brilliant products launched with a big bang failing to get required traction. "Entrepreneurs are often unsuccessful to comprehend the ways to acquire customers and also how much the targeted customers will cost to acquire," he informs.

His rule of thumb is simple: The acquisition cost must to be considerably lower than their lifetime worth. Yet many go berserk on these fundamentals when launching products.

Your Original Idea Might be Wrong

In many cases it so happens that products go through serious changes before being launched. This happens worldwide. "For every product I've created, the final version was spectacularly altered from the original idea I started on. Series of experiments and interviews helped me to challenge the conjectures, abandon poor ideas, unearth innovative characteristics, and tweak the prices," agrees Rout.

He feels that often an undue amount of time is spent on writing business plans which are actually works of fiction. Many launch their products on the basis of the original idea and end up wasting time, energy and resources to change the product and pricing in order to fit the market. That's retrograding!

It's imperative that amending your ideas during the initial substantiation of the product rather than after building it is significantly cheaper.

Perfect is the Foe of Good

Saurav Jhawar, Founder of Obo-Swift Services, which delivers anything and everything within 55 minutes believes that entrepreneurs should jump off the cliff, especially software products should be launched at the earliest.

"Software products can be launched quickly with nominal features if the product offers adequate value. Even if a handful of customers are keen to buy, it's sufficient and you can get better with time," he opines.

There is actually no way to methodically know with conviction whether you'll be thriving in your product launch. However, by means of these techniques and launching pragmatically you can perk up your odds significantly.

Baishali Mukherjee

Former Freelancer

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