Marketing disaster: Going public to soon.

We all know it, we made something new and we feel excited, this it is, after weeks, months or even years of preparation you did it, your new website, service or whatever is ready for the public. You tested it yourself and it works.

You take your list of prospects, email database and publish it to your 10.000 followers and friends on the social media. Let them come you are ready..... ARE YOU? Are you really ready?

It happened to me more as one year ago, I worked on this project for such a long time and when it went online I was excited, I was happy, I was feeling like a king, but I wasn't ready and made a very big mistake.

I invited all people that I knew, used all my databases and networks to tell the: "LOOK WHAT I MADE!!" "COME TO THE WEBSITE!!" and "START USING IT!!"

And then everything went wrong, people used the website not like I expected, went to other places, didn't login like I wanted, the 2 programmers went on holiday just hours after the launch and much more. Errors, Errors and more mistakes. It was the worse launch ever. I got a lot of complains and negative reactions. After one week my visitors dropped with 60% and it took me 4 months to get them back. It was the worse 4 months of my life, 4 months debugging, repairing trust and answering complains.

It was a hard lesson and made me understand one thing, if you make a project and you think it is finished, let it seriously test by other people. People who you not instruct. When they criticize you, it not means an attack on you, but they want to help you.

If I would have been more patience and do a much slower and rolling start, I would have found the bugs without the massive complains and loss of clients....

Now we are almost ready to launch a new part of the project, and I decided not to launch it 5 days before our main programmer will go on holiday. 2 weeks waiting and some extra checking can't harm anyone.

So my advice: Don't go public to soon, relax and double*double check. If your idea is really that good, it will still be good in several days.