3 Lessons I Learned from Doing 3 Successful Product Launches in 1 Week

Last week was an incredible experience for myself and our entire team. We successfully executed 3 major product launches in one week. I learnt a lot, and we definitely pushed the limits, but I’m proud of the results.

Few of you who were following the launches asked me to write about the experience and lessons learned, so here it is.

What did we launch?

We acquired Google Analytics by Yoast plugin and relaunched it under a new brand, MonsterInsights. This plugin has nearly 11 million downloads and over 1 million active installs.

We launched OptinMonster 3.0 which was HUGE. It now has real-time behavior detection that allows you to do onsite follow up campaigns, onsite retargeting, and so much more.

We revamped the entire Envira Gallery workflow. This was a major rewrite of our admin area that will help us grow Envira Gallery further.

Now that you’re up to date, you can probably imagine how stressful this must have been. But I had a lot of fun because it was challenging and we learnt a lot.

If you ask my wife, she’ll tell you the most important lesson that I should’ve learnt is to never do it again. LOL.

While she’s right, I think there are 3 other things that are important for all launches.

1. Have Processes and Checklists

Whether you’re executing on one launch or three launches, the best way to reduce last-minute scrambles is to document everything into processes and checklists.

We use Dropbox Notes to drop in all the ideas and then organized them into checklists on Basecamp.

You would then assign each item to a team member which streamlines the entire process.

2. Things go wrong – How you react to it is what’s important.

Having done my fair share of launches, there’s one thing for sure. Things will always go wrong, no matter how hard you prepare.

The most important part is owning up to your mistakes and fixing the issues as fast as possible.

Listen to user feedback and respond to everyone courteously.

Lastly, always have a plan of action for what to do if things go wrong.

For example when moving to OptinMonster 3.0, we had a beta setup where we did all the testing. We also created a backup site for v2 that users and our team can access if things go wrong. This was helpful because few optins got corrupt during the migration process because some users working on Saturday morning when we pushed the update. We used v2 backup to quickly restore their optins.

3. Have an amazing team and delegate responsibilities

I work with some of the most amazingly talented people in the world. 99% of our success is due to the hard work of our team.

The best thing I have done is getting out of their way and letting them make AWESOMENESS. Instead of micro-managing, we assign tasks and responsibilities to each person in the team.

I trust them to make the right decision, and it’s pretty easy to do so because everyone is a lot smarter than me in their specialty.

Bonus Advice

Don’t do 3 launches in 1 week unless you absolutely have to, and you have dedicated teams for each project.

I’ll be sharing another post highlighting MonsterInsights and giving you some detailed behind the scenes information. But I wanted to do a quick write up on the blog because I want to always remember last week (it was one of the most fun I have ever had).

If you haven’t checked out the updates that we did last week, then I highly recommend you to check it out. I’m super excited about the direction we’re heading and can’t wait to show you what’s coming next.

Also, I want to thank everyone who supported us through out this process as well as everyone who hated on us through out the process. Both fuels me to work harder.