xIndexer Journal - My Internet Service Launch & Progress

[xindexer]

A few years ago, I had an idea for an internet-based marketing/SEO service. I wrote down all the steps that would be needed to create this service, and I documented how it would work, and I figured out my costs as well as the time/effort that would be needed to create it.

The service would allow a user to post an article to a private site network, and the service would also build links to a user's site(s) on high-PageRank sites in a private network. The service would also ping their links and post their links to social bookmarking services - all in an effort to provide the user with eventual higher search engine rankings.

For years, I never got around to doing it.

Fast-forward to present-day. I've finally coded, used, and tested my service for myself over the past 8 months or so.

I am launching my service as a monthly subscription-based site this Friday, and have been making last-minute changes/fixes in the meantime. Yesterday I sent out a preliminary email to my email list which I've allowed to build up since January. (I used MailChimp, and put a signup form on my homepage.)

I'm using the launch formula that ViperChill recommended, which he calls his MWF formula: Monday you send out a quick intro email, you send out a Wednesday email with more details about your product, and Friday you send out the launch announcement and launch your product.

My Friday email will introduce some scarcity to the product, because I will only make it available for a few days (Friday through Monday). After the signup period expires, I will close down access to any new signups, and also raise the price for the next time I allow signups. (I plan on offering a short signup period of 1-2 days each month when I accept new users.)

One reason I want to limit signups to my service is to keep it a very high-quality group of users, and keep the service somewhat exclusive. I want to differentiate myself from the competitors.

A reason for incrementally raising my price is due to the fact that the service will become more valuable each month, as I add resources to it. (Subscribers will be "grandfathered in" at whatever price they originally signed up.)

Today, as I tie up the loose ends before launch, I am getting pretty excited about launching my fastlane business. It meets the criteria I read about in the Fastlane book, I think it has potential to provide real value to my users, and I see the potential to eventually serve a large number of users with my service. So I'm feeling optimistic right now - and pretty excited about the prospect of making some money (finally)!

We'll have to wait until launch day to see what kind of response I get to my pre-launch emails, but I will document my progress in this thread.

[77startup]

Congrats! So basically you are doing a hard launch as opposed to a soft launch? Here is a video series that may help you it's called "start up lessons learned" Justin.tv - Startup Lessons Learned - Videos.

ps. Check out my thread called "Customer Acquisition"

[xindexer]

Yes this is a hard launch with a definite date. I'm sure I'll learn some lessons from it and wish I did something differently when I look back, but the way I'm launching it makes sense to me for now. I have a list that I've been building, so it's an obvious way to announce the product launch.

I've thought about using PPC as well, but to be honest I just want to see what happens after the initial launch, work out any bugs, and then go from there.

[xindexer]

Well, I sent out my sequence of pre-launch emails but then I ran into a major hurdle: it turns out that an identically-named service doing almost the same thing as my service has already launched. He has the .com, and I have the .net.

The irony is that I had my service coded before any of my current competitors came out with theirs, and as far as I know I was the first person to even do what I'm doing. (I used the series of tools I wrote for my own personal websites and also for a couple of companies who paid to use it.) When I finally decided I wanted to turn it into a subscription-based web app, I thought of a name for it. When I tried to buy the domain to match, the .com was already taken. (It was a blank domain though - I had no idea what it would one day be used for.)

That was last year.

Fast-forward to the other day, just hours before I was about to launch and open my site for registration, I got an email from the guy who owns the .com. I looked at his site, and realized what happened. He was angry about it (he apparently thought I intentially copied him - when in fact I had created my app probably before he even started).

It all seems to have worked out though - I understand where he was coming from and how it appeared to him. I just told him "sorry, I'll change my service name and domain" and that's what I have to do over this weekend. I didn't want to fight with him, and plus he already launched. Plus he owned the .com which looks like the "real" one in any case.

It actually worked out better; in the end, I think I got a better domain than the one I had. It's an exact-match for one of the main searches in my niche, so hopefully I actually get some level of SEO benefit.

Lessons learned:
1. Only get a .com domain.
2. If you own a .com, but the .net and maybe the .biz as well. Just to keep other people from having a similar domain as yours.
3. Differentiate yourself from others. That's really a lesson for the other guy; he should have seen my site (which had already been up for about 8 months) at some point and thought, "hey, maybe I need to rename MY site". If I wanted to I could have fought him over it, but I'm a nice guy. Not everyone is.
4. Get there first. Again, I really did that, but for the other guy: he should have put up a landing page (at least) immediately when he bought his domain. If he'd have done that, I never would have bought the .net version of it.

Well, back to work. I have some stuff to transfer over to the new domain to get this ready for launch. Not sure how it will affect my sales, but I believe in doing the right thing (even to my competitors!) and I think everything will pay off and work out fine in the end.

[bernieshawn]

Hey, I have just launched a business in the SEO niche also! Hope yours is more successful then mine has been - after developing and launching it, I realized that the market that my service targets is way too small (I target SEO service providers, not SEO service buyers). Not a huge market, and most of them already have stuff that does what my service does. I'm actually thinking about making a progress thread myself to see if I can breathe some life into my business before I move onto something else.

I'm interested in comparing our services and experience though - PM me if you want to (if you don't feel comfortable revealing your service that's completely fine).