(An opinion post written by Rusha)
I remember launching my first ever product from my business just like it was yesterday.
I never even knew how to launch a product from a hobby, I didn't think about a launch strategy or a marketing strategy. I just thought that if I’ve created something, all I need to do is put it on the market and voile! People will buy my product. Oh how I was so naive.
What is a ‘launch strategy’? May you ask.
- Well, a launch strategy is a strategy you want to use when you first ‘launch’ your product. You market to your targeted audience and you use a strategy over a short period of time to announce your product, and sell your product.
When I launched my first ever product, I only marketed it to my audience that I had built through a telegram group which had around 30 people in it. I honestly had no idea where I was meant to announce my product, so I just did my launch in the telegram group and unfortunately due to the lack of my knowledge I limited my launch to just 30 people. I made just over 1k NZD but I had no way of reaching new customers. I was stabbing myself in the foot.
If I had known how to launch a product from a hobby I could have created a great launch strategy that could have kept my product around today. See how important a launch strategy is?!
So, how does one launch a product from a hobby?
- Having a launch strategy is one thing, but figuring out your first product to launch from your hobby is another. It's really important to do your research about what it is you want to launch. There's nothing worse than having to change your product after you’ve already launched it to your targeted audience. That's detrimental to your brand and the current customers you would already have.
Take it from someone who has done exactly that. I launched my first product to my 30 audience in a telegram group to then later on change the price and the benefits of the product a few months down. It didn’t turn out too well, my audience started to diminish because the current changes to my product stopped attracting the audience I had and more or less set me up for a new audience.
… And that audience wasn’t in my telegram group.
The thing was, I never did any research into my product, I didn’t know what my target market was and I didn’t even understand my pricing. Instead, I just came up with an idea of a product, I targeted every traveler in the universe and I slapped on a random price.
Diving deep into your passions is vital in launching a product from a hobby
- Figure out what your hobbies are
- Ask yourself things like, what are you good at? What do you enjoy?
- Then have a look at those things and try to think about which one of those hobbies you can potentially turn into a business
This is the part where things start getting tricky and where a lot of people tend to rush over when in fact, you need to take time for.
Once you’ve figured out the product that you can launch from a hobby you need to dive deep into what it is that you want to launch from that hobby. What will your product be?
To start really forming your product think of things like:
- Who can benefit from this product?
- What problems will this product solve? Is it for entertainment, leisure?
Don’t make the same mistake I did, think about your target market and really think about your pricing. Look at your competitors and see what they’re doing. A bit of research will go a long way and it will help you to start forming your ideas around your product.
Stop talking about it, get to work!
Now that you have put the work in to figure out your product, and you’ve realised how important a launch strategy is and you’ve started to formulate your ideas.. Where do you go from here you may say?
“Dreams will stay dreams if you don’t ‘work’ on them.” And by ‘work’ I mean, creating tasks every day, every week to work on getting that step closer to launching a product from a hobby.
From here on out it's important for you to have a day to day structure in bringing you closer to launching your product.
- Start understanding what tasks need to get done for you to get closer to the day you will launch your product
- Think of things like; creating your product, making a website, writing up your launch strategy etc
- Set a deadline for when you want to launch
It’s all said and done going through the phase of finding your product from your hobby that you want to launch, it’s all said and done figuring out your target market and pricing… but do you have the discipline to do the work over the next few weeks to develop your product, put it on the market and sell it?
Putting all this work together, everything from the start of this article to now, requires structure and organisation.
There’s a lot of valuable info in here on how to launch a product from a hobby. You don’t want to soak up all this knowledge to then start working on your idea and then go nowhere because you don’t have a set out structure ready to go…
That’s where I can help.
A friend and I have put together all this info on ‘how to launch a product from a hobby’ into a planner.
Our Manafest planner takes you through 4 phases on how to launch a product from a hobby.
Our planner has structure and organisation tools that you can use right now. Don’t just sleep on your dreams, get working on them right now with our Manafest planner!
Ngā mihi nunui,
Rusha xx