You can only launch once, so do it right

With PalmPay live in Nigeria and Ghana live and 4 more African markets in-flight, here are some lessons from my experience over the last 2 years.

1. Do your research

I know this might appear obvious, but understanding the market landscape before you start gives you the power to make better long term decisions.

Spending time early on to get this right will direct your strategy and give your project plan a strong foundation. Knowing the market will give you a competitive edge - you need to build a unique proposition for your customers to be successful and don’t forget your customers know the market already.

Doing your research means more than just competitive analysis (across features, UX, marketing, pricing). You must understand both the landscape and how different business models work in context. For example, for card payment processing you might want to look at different aggregators, interchange (base costs), layers within the ecosystem (aggregators or direct connections?) and how fraud rates may impact your business.

Lastly don’t underestimate how pricing and promotions underpin your overall proposition. Having a good product is not enough, you must communicate your unique proposition clearly to customers.

2. Plan, plan, plan

So we’re agile, no need for a plan right? Let’s just “assume” it will work…

A plan helps to bring everyone together (insert comment about Gantt charts here). I strongly recommend capturing all the tasks across the entire launch project and map them to your time lines. You don’t want a last minute issue from customer care holding things up just at the wrong point. Pull your team together on weekly calls, moving to daily ones as things get more urgent. Assign someone (or hire) the project manager role and make sure everything is done on time! Talk about your risks and issues often.

3. Go fast or go slow?

Product launches come in many different shapes and sizes - the big bangs, the beta pilots, the waitlists. What will yours be?

In Nigeria, we launched a waitlist where customers could earn some loyalty points by referring other customers into the waitlist. This created demand and we acquired tens of thousands of customers. Using the waitlist we launched slowly by brining customers into the core service. During this period we tested our processes and made improvements. Others have been extremely successful with this approach (see Robinhood for example), but your approach will depend on the product and market.

In general, going slowly can help the business learn and build in quality before you on-board too many customers. Scaling can bring its own challenges.

4. Go step by step

Whatever your launch approach, try to agree the phasing with your business teams so you can move step by step. Define these phases with clear inputs and outputs before you start. This will help give you a context to operate within as part of the project.

For example, the Alpha pilot can start when all stakeholders sign off and UAT is finished (etc etc). The Alpha pilot transitions into the Beta phase when you’ve had X customers and Y transactions, and when the customer feedback has been fully addressed.

Keep your stakeholders close and update them daily.

5. Metrics define success

Your metrics decide how you will measure success - pick carefully! Check out a16z for some great thoughts about metrics.

If you have a data person, get them involved. Otherwise, make your stakeholders responsible for measuring their own metrics and publishing them too! Align on progress daily to start with and then weekly as everything stabilizes.

Good Luck!