SaaS Product Launch Plan (Step-by-Step Guide)

You ever watch another startup's launch video and just get a little jealous? You know what I'm talking about. Super fancy launch video, huge VC raise, and amazing customer stories. And then you look at your own SaaS product and your own SaaS launch plan, and you ask yourself, how do I get to that level? Here's the thing that they're not telling you. That launch that you're seeing is the third phase of a three-phase launch plan. In this episode, I'm gonna walk you through the three key phases of a successful SaaS launch plan. And then I'm gonna explain why this works and why it's set up this way. And then I'm gonna give you the action steps to follow so that you're set up for success and you get to that scalable and exponential growth launch. And when you watch till the end of this episode, you will be able to launch your SaaS product and you'll be able to accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. Intro. What's up, everybody? Welcome to Unstoppable. I'm TK, and on this channel, I help SaaS and AI founders like you grow your businesses faster with an unstoppable strategy. If you're new to this channel, be sure to hit the subscribe button and that bell icon, and you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode with the TK Energy. If you're already part of this community, if you're part of my coaching programs, my people, welcome back, really awesome to see you over here. For my last company, TowerApp, we amassed over 100,000 registered users. We were backed by the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Jackson Square Ventures, Founder Collective, and even Jason Kalkanis. We pioneered the $5.2 billion sales engagement category, And we launched at a time when no one even knew about sales engagement. I went on to scale ToutApp, we sold it to a company called Marketo. And then I worked at Marketo doing a two-year transformation. I helped sell Marketo to Adobe for $4.75 billion. And then after that, I started my current company, Unstoppable. Unstoppable itself launched, and now has amassed over a hundred thousand subscribers across the platforms that I operate in. And I've coached hundreds of founders on their go-to-market launch strategies for all the founders that I've worked with. And for the companies that I've built, I followed this three step launch framework. So in this episode, I'm first gonna show you the three stages and explain what they are. Then I'm gonna explain to you why this works. And then I'm gonna give you the action steps to follow so you can put this all into play. So if you're excited, dig in, go and smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm, and let's dig right into it. Now, it's always good to begin with the end in mind. So just to be clear, phase three, which we'll build into, is that big bang launch that you see that you get a little bit jealous about. the fancy video, the VC, the successful customers, and they're just putting it out there to their entire ICP, and they're just printing cash. So we're gonna work into that by step number three, and then I'm explaining why in action steps. But let's start with step number one in your launch strategy. Step number one is your goal is to earn a little bit of money. And by the way, as you get to stage three, you're gonna be earning a lot of money, a lot of revenues. So the goal of stage number one is to earn a little bit of money. And this is one of the things that founders make a huge mistake on, is they kind of jump to stage number three. They try to do a video and then their entire launch plan is like a product hunt launch and posting on LinkedIn. And it doesn't work. Maybe you're popular for a day and then it just fizzles out. And maybe that's why you're watching this because you're now trying to relaunch. And then also another trap that people fall into is they go back into the one more feature trap thinking, oh, that didn't work, no one wants it. Then we go back and build more features and then finally we'll be ready. None of that works. So the first step to really do to make sure you don't waste months building the wrong product or doing a launch that's just gonna fall flat on your face is to do the network launch. The network launch is where you sell the product that you're building to your own network. Now, this doesn't mean that you only sell it to your mom or your dad. That's not what this is about. The clarity here is identifying exactly who this product is for, what your ideal customer is, and who in your network you already know that falls into that ICP. So that's why it has to be your own network that you're selling into. Now, there's a couple of gated caveats here. If you don't know a single person in your network that you can sell to and get as a customer who already knows you, they like you, there is some trust there. If you don't know a single person like that, then chances are you don't have a clear ideal customer profile, and you actually don't know who you're building for. And since one of the common traps that founders fall into, where they kind of skip this part because they're like, oh, TK, I don't know anyone personally, So I gotta go for the big bang launch. And it's like, listen, if you don't know a single person, then how do you know you're building the right thing? How do you know you're talking about the problem you're solving in the right way? How do you know you're not just solving for yourself and that's it and no one else out there actually has the same problem or is willing to trust you to solve the problem with you versus going with the competition? So all those reasons start to get knocked down when you force yourself to say, who in my own network Do I know that is my ICP that I can earn my first dollar from? So that's step number one, that's stage number one that you wanna do, and that's your gaining factor. There are a couple of things that have to go into this. One, you have to have a clear ICP, and two, you have to have a clear articulation of the problem that you're solving and an explanation of what your solution is, your 10X solution. And with these three things, you go to the list of people that are in your network that you know, and you engage them and say, hey, are you struggling with this problem? We're building this solution. We would love to show you what we're building and get you in as an early customer. And you'll notice over here, this line that starts to scale really fast is almost like below zero, because for that first customer, maybe you give them a sweetheart deal and almost cost nothing, or it's a dollar or it's like a thousand dollars where normally it would be a $10,000 solution. That kind of depends. It depends on what the problem is and what the solution is and how well you know the person. But the whole point of this is to really acknowledge the ICP, the problem, the solution, and that it actually works. So that's phase number one. And a lot of people skip that and try to jump to the product hunt piece or the big bang launch, and then they fall flat on their face. Just think about the number of startups in the startup graveyard that were product hunts of the day. There's like millions of them. So that's my point. Stage number one is of the launch phase is you launch to your existing network. The people that already know you, that like you, that trust you, and you go to them and say, "'Hey, this is what we're doing. "'We'd love to have you involved.'" And one of the things, one of the pro tips I like to give is you should still charge money. Even if it's your brother you're selling to, you should charge money. You should say like, hey, listen, we're doing this. Normally it would be this price, but we're gonna give it to you for this lower price because I know you, but it will cost you money because there's real cost for us to do this with you. This does two things. One, it proves that people are willing to pay for this. And two, it puts skin in the game. When they pay, they will pay attention, which is also what you need for them to use your product or deploy your AI agent or whatever it is that your product does, you're gonna need them to be engaged. So when they put money into it, they're more likely to do it. They're gonna have to prove some ROI there. So that's stage number one. Once you've done stage number one, then you can go to stage number two. Stage number two is more money. And again, you're not going for that huge big bang launch. This is where you go and sell to your network's network. Let's just say there are 25 people that you know that falls into your ICP, that has the problem, and you start to engage with them. And out of that, let's just say out of that 25, you get five of them as customers. Well, now what you wanna do is now that you've actually engaged with these 25 people and hopefully shown value shown success, at least initial success, depending on the timeline, to these five people, you want to go engage these people and say, hey, totally cool if this is not quite the right fit for you. Who else in your network fits this ICP, has this problem that you can introduce us to? That would be seriously appreciated. And then also for these five people, you want to engage them and say, hey, do you know another person in your network that has the same problem that we just solved for you? would you be able to refer them to us? So what you wanna do is before you go for the big bang launch, you should double or triple your customer count based on the people that you've already talked to that already trust you. This again is a step that a lot of founders skip and jump to this third stage and then kind of fall flat on the face. But when you do this step, a couple of things happen. Again, the big thing is trust. Just like your network trusts you, therefore they're more likely to buy from you, your network's networks, they trust each other. and so they're more likely to buy from each other. So when they're referring you in, you get that trust transferred to you, and therefore you're more likely to actually get them as a customer, even though you're not a fully legit company yet. So that's phase number two, where you go to your networks network. The one thing to keep in mind is there's actually no speed limit between one, two, and three. This could happen in the course of one week. It could happen in the course of one month. It could happen in the course of three months. It could happen in the course of three years, whatever it may be, there's actually no speed limit here. You can move very aggressively through this because the quicker you pitch your network effectively with the right message and you get them as customers, the quicker you get customer success. And the quicker you get customer success, you get more referrals and you get more customers, you can double your customers. And you could do that in the course of a month. And that's why, this is actually an important point, that's why AI companies are actually growing so quickly. you're able to go in and prove a value very, very quickly, at least initial value, which is why these companies are actually snowballing so fast, because companies are one, willing to try new AI solutions, they have budget for it. And two, you can actually prove value versus a eight month implementation period, which SAS 1.0 used to have. SAS 1.0 had a much longer implementation period, so it used to take longer, but you can get through stages one and two that much faster. Now, there are a couple of outputs that are really coming into this by the time you go into this third launch. And I'm gonna talk about what the obvious things are that goes into this launch, but some of the non-obvious things in the third step. Now, before I do that, let me just pause here for a second. Are you starting to see the power in this? One of the biggest things that I try to teach founders that I've learned in my own journey, that I've taught founders that I coach for when they've successfully actually launched and driven success for their businesses, one of the biggest things that I try to teach is these two phases. The slower you go here and the more intentional you are, the quicker you can actually speed up by the time you get into the big boy launch. The faster you try to graze over these things and try to go for the big launch, the more likely it is that you'll be wasting months building the wrong product and then doing a big launch, tainting the brand and then falling flat, and then having to go back and retract and try to launch again, which can get a little awkward. The biggest thing you really wanna do is think about stage one and stage two before you jump into stage number three for your big bang launch. If you're starting to see the power in this, can I just get a yes in the comments below? And also smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. Also, if you're in this stage where you've built a product and you're looking to launch successfully and you're looking to drive initial revenues and then scale from there, this is exactly why I created my SaaS launch program. The launch program is specifically designed to help you implement these three stages for your launch and accelerate your path to that next stage of growth. So you don't have to go anywhere right now. I'll tell you more about it at the end of this episode. I'll also link to the details about that program below. But right now, let's go to stage number three. So stage number three is where you see those insane launches. This is where the big money is made. This is what we call the big boy launch. and it can also be called the big bang launch, whatever you wanna call it. I like to call it the big bang launch, but it's also the big boy launch, depending on who you wanna talk to. The big boy launch is that VC money that you're raised and you're now announcing. It's that really fancy, highly produced launch video. It is the customer success stories that where other people are saying, oh my God, I love this platform and you gotta get on it too. So those are the things that you see on the outside and you look at it and say, oh my God, how do I get to that level? Well, what you don't realize is they followed the stage one where they went to their existing networks. Then they went to the network network, the network of the people that they actually have in their own network and got even more customers. And then as they built up trust and proof points and really hardened the product and really polished in their messaging, they went for the big bang launch. So there's a set of things that you see on the outside, but there's a set of things that are happening on the inside. Now, there are a couple of things that are worth mentioning that are also happening on the inside. You just now know these two phases that they went through and it's easy to skip over those phases and just try to do a weird product launch or a big bang launch without having these pieces. But there are a couple of other things they also dial in. One of the things that they dial in is their funnel. Let's just say tomorrow people wake up and magically, magically, they find out about your product. some majorly famous person gets on stage or tweets out, Elon Musk tweets out like, "'Hey, you gotta go check out newsasco.com.'" And he links to it. And people just flood, like millions of people just flood to your homepage. Immediately you're thinking, "'Oh my God, I'm changing my homepage.'" You're not ready, obviously. The thing is what they've also dialed in by the time they got to this big boy launch through these two phases is their funnel. They figured out their go-to-market strategy. They've figured out their homepage. They figured out their pricing. And they've also figured out their sales or product-led process. Meaning, by the time they do the big boy launch and they get millions of people coming to their website, trying out their product, booking a sales call, they've already figured these pieces out because they went through phase one and phase two. This stuff goes into building a scalable go-to-market strategy, which you actually want to have in place. So you can actually take advantage of the big boy launch. What's the use of getting PR articles, a fancy video, tons of eyeballs, tons of clicks, tons of likes, if you don't convert that to real revenue. So one of the other things that's sort of below the line that you don't really realize is by the time they're stepping into that, they have a ton of these pieces in place. That's super important because when you think about it, How did Chad GPT launch? Or how did Anthropic launch? Or how did Slack launch? Or how did Snowflake launch? No one remembers their actual launch date, but you do remember the fact that over the last 90 days alone, Anthropic released a whole bunch of brand new features that each of them were mini launches, but they know that when they get that attention now, it backs into all these pieces. So you can actually convert that to real users and real revenue. So the smart founders don't go for the big boy launch right on day one. They build into it. They build into this third stage, which is what you see and get a little jealous about, but what they've really done behind the scenes is they've done the work on stage number two and stage number one. Let's talk a little bit more about why this works. So in order for you to actually launch, and no one really just wants to launch for the sake of launching, like sure, your mom will be proud that some random news site picked up your PR news article or someone retweeted you, but it doesn't turn into revenues. and at the end of the day, you wanna turn into revenues. The reason this really works, this process, underlying all of this, is you wanna convert attention to revenues. And in order to really turn attention to revenue, the biggest thing that you need is trust. Meaning you can get someone's attention, but they're not gonna sign up or book a sales call or start a trial and convert to paid unless there's that initial trust. Building that trust requires some work. It requires the right funnel, the right homepage, the right pricing, the right sales and product-led process, the right messaging. It requires all these things. And it's impossible to get that right on this first big bang launch. So trust is a lot easier when it starts with your own network. It's a lot easier when you go to your own network and they refer you to their network. That trust transfers. Therefore, you can honestly make some mistakes. Your homepage doesn't have to be perfect. Your messaging doesn't have to be fully dialed in. You just have to be very clear on your ideal customer. The problem that you solve, you need to be able to explain why you're 10 times better in terms of your solution. You can have that conversation, you can earn that meeting. And that allows you to get this momentum going as you're getting into your big bang launch. The second thing that really comes in handy by the time you enter into this, the reason this works really well is success stories. At every stage of the process, you're going to collect success stories. With these five customers that you got from your own network, they're going to get success. Maybe half of them get success. Maybe you have to adapt the product and harden the product to actually get to success. And believe me, for ToutApp, some of our early customers pushed us. It was uncomfortable, but it made the product better so that we could earn that next stage of customers. So it's super important to go to them once you have delivered success and capture success stories at every stage. When you go to your network's network, you can show the initial success stories. And then they become successful, so you get even more success stories. And these success stories feed into your big bang launch. So that by the time you're doing that big launch, that third stage of the launch, you already have success stories on your website. You have some customer logos. And in fact, by this time, you're gonna get so much momentum, you might actually raise a bigger round even before you launch, which will be part of the launch framework. And believe me, if you're just launching and you have some whiz bang product, it's very hard to get attention. But if you're launching and you have success stories and you just have a big venture amount that you wanna announce, that big bang becomes easier. It's not the only way. There's lots of bootstrap companies that get tons of attention on their launch, but those three ingredients make for the trifecta, which is probably why you see those launches in the first place and get a little jealous, because they have all three of those things. Now you don't have to have all three of those things, but you definitely need to have the trust and the success stories, because those two things will actually propel your launch. And the VC money is a plus. Okay, so that's why this works. Now there's also one more nuance on the why. Every single SaaS business that I work on, every single founder that I coach, One of the things that I teach them is the flywheel. This is true for any business, but it's particularly true for software businesses, whether it's AI or SaaS, because we bank on having a recurring revenue model. This is how the flywheel works. First, you get the attention of your ideal customers. You have your ideal customer profile. Then it's one thing to just get their attention. It's another thing for them to take action and actually go into your website or start a trial or book a call. That's activation. The third piece is revenue, meaning they actually buy from you. The fourth piece is retention. Not only do they buy, they achieve some level of success, so they keep using it. And then finally, it's referral. They love it so much, they start telling their friends and their peers about it. And the more attention you get, the more you activate, the more you convert to revenue, the more you retain, the more referrals that you get, and this becomes a flywheel. It starts going faster and faster and faster and faster and faster. This is the ultimate goal. You want to have a proper flywheel so that by the time you get into this third stage of the Big Bang launch, which by the way, you don't need to do the Big Bang launch to get to your next inflection point of growth. You can actually increase revenue growth without having to do the Big Bang launch. You can do it later, but it gets this flywheel going. By the time you enter into it, you have a version of this flywheel and all this Big Bang launch is doing is feeding more attention. but you now know that by the time you get those millions of eyeballs, your website, your funnel, your pricing, your sales process, your product-led process will turn that attention, activate them, convert them to revenue, keep them and get referrals going. And that's the whole point of doing a big bang launch like that. What this means is during stage number one, you are obsessed about making sure that even one person that comes through that already trusts you gets through this full flywheel. Not just to pay you, but to actually keep using the product and to refer you. For the next five people that come in, you're obsessed about turning those five people to go through all this entire flywheel and get another 10 people coming back into your attention layer. That's the whole point of phase one and phase two, which means that you're obsessed about making sure the product delivers. You're obsessed that every customer is successful. And that's one of those counterintuitive things because it's sexy to do a lifetime deal on an AppSumo or a product hunt launch. But what that does is get a bunch of people that are not even your ICP, a bunch of tire kickers. Now you're stuck with them for life. It sounds like a bad marriage. Whereas this makes sure that you go through this cycle to actually get happy customers that are referring you and then building the momentum to that big bang launch, knowing that by the time you invest in that big bang launch, you're getting millions of people coming into this flywheel with trust because all these messaging, the sales process, which is all about building more trust with strangers and success stories to actually convert them to revenues and get more referrals going. That's why this three-phased launch works. And that's why you should structure your SaaS product launch plan between these three phases. So let's recap and then we'll get into the action steps. You wanna first start with your own network. If you don't know anyone in your own network, it's time to make some new friends and make them your new BFFs manually, or rethink and be honest with yourself that maybe you actually don't know who you're building for and you should stop pretending. Once you sell on your own network, take the customer success stories and get your network's network to buy from you, get some more success stories, get the flywheel going, and then go towards your big bang launch. What you're doing is leveraging trust by using your own network and then your network's network and then going broader. And as you're using that trust, you're getting even more trust by capturing the success stories, which builds trust with strangers. That's why you're doing it. And as you're doing these three phases, you are making sure you're activating this entire flywheel of growth. That's how this all comes together. Now let's talk about action steps. Here are the key things you need to build out for your SaaS product launch plan. And this is true for AI products, SaaS products, AI SaaS products, whatever you call it, it's software. This is true for all of them and it's working better than ever today. Number one, you want to get clear on your ideal customer profile. Number two, you want to develop your value proposition. Even if people trust you, they may not buy from you because they don't understand what you're doing. So you need to actually develop your one sentence value proposition that clearly articulates what you do and why you're 10 times better. The third thing is you want to launch a mini funnel. Not a full funnel, not a big bang launch, a mini funnel. A mini funnel, part of it is marketing so you can actually engage with your network in the right way, both online and offline, to turn them into meetings, to turn them into trials, and your initial customers. And you also want to have a proper sales process. Even though they trust you, you're still going to want to sell them because if they don't pay even a little bit, they won't have skin in the game and you won't get success stories, which is your ultimate metric. So you want to make sure that you have both a marketing and a sales process for this mini funnel so that you can get to your first set of customers and then compound that to your second set of customers and then compound that to your big bang launch. So now you know my three-stage SaaS product launch plan. These are the three steps that I always follow for every single company I've ever started and for the founders that I coach. What you may not know is TK, how do I develop my ideal customer profile? How do I develop my value proposition? And how do I set up my mini funnel and how do I instrument all of this so that I'm getting my first set of customers. I'm turning that into my next set of customers and I'm turning that into my full launch. So if you want help with this, if you want the step-by-step framework to follow so that you can actually stop wasting time looking at 500 YouTube episodes and just follow the framework to implement all this and get results quickly, this is why I created my SaaS launch program. Inside of my SaaS launch program, you get the step-by-step training, the framework, the AI tools, and my direct coaching so that you can implement your SaaS launch plan and you can accelerate your path to the next stage of growth. So to learn more on how to join the program, just follow the link in the description below. There's a link right in there. Or just go to tkkader.com slash launch dash program. tkkader.com slash launch dash program. Now, the better the fit, the better the results. Which is why if you'd like to join the program, I ask you to fill out a short application form. The application form will ask you to answer some basic questions about where you are and what your goals are and what you're struggling with. And based on that, I review every single one. If it's a fit, we get you onboarded and we're off to the races right away. So if you'd like to work together on your SaaS launch plan and accelerate your path to the next stage of growth, just go to tkkader.com slash launch dash program. tkkader.com slash launch dash program, or follow the link in the description below. Also, if you got value from this video, which hopefully you did, if you're still watching, please smash that like button for the YouTube algorithm. It just loves it when you do that. I drop an episode every single Sunday with actual strategies and tactics from the trenches on how to grow your AI and SaaS business faster. So if you haven't already, be sure to hit the subscribe button and a bell icon, where you'll get notified every single time I drop an episode. Now there's one of two kinds of people that watch my YouTube channel. There's one bucket and they really want to consume all the videos that I have. And there's a second bucket where they are consuming some of my videos, but they really want the cheat sheet. They want to work with me and they want to fast track their progress to launching their AI and SaaS business. So if you'd like to fast track your progress, just follow the link in the description below. If you'd like to watch more YouTube videos to really understand how I think about that stuff, then check out this video. Inside of this video, I give you the go-to-market framework for launching a SaaS product. That's all I have for you today. Take care, everybody.

On today’s Unstoppable Sunday episode,  I’m going to show you the three stage SaaS Product Launch Plan that every successful startup follows to world domination.

First, I’ll show you the 3-step B2B SaaS product launch strategy, then I’ll explain why this works, and then I’ll give you the action list to follow and when you implement these three stages, you’ll be able to accelerate your path to exponential growth.

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Learn more about my SaaS Launch Program (Accelerate to $10K MRR and beyond)👇
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Everyone needs a strategy for their life and their business. When you're with us, yours will be Unstoppable. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one! -TK

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Validate Your Startup Idea: https://youtu.be/8ASnpufS5UI
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