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If celebrity influencers are incorporated into your marketing plan right from the beginning, then your startup better be ready since day 1 as well.
By:
Max Ringelheim
There’s a saying in the startup world that companies in their early stages should just launch their website as soon as they have a working MVP (minimum viable product). The point of this is simply to see what happens and how users and the market react to your idea. I can genuinely appreciate this statement, and I’ve experienced it firsthand.
With my first startup, Vonvo.com, there were multiple times during the three iterations of our technology where I struggled to hit that all-powerful launch button.
Things to may when developing a new product:
Whether or not your design is perfect.
Whether the elements on the page are properly aligned.
Whether or not one more feature needs to be developed before launch.
Is all the technology's functionality even working properly and well enough for launch?
These various factors can certainly deter any entrepreneur from launching their product—and rightly so.
One thing I can definitely say is exponentially more daunting: adhering to this methodology when launching an expensive consumer goods product line. DO NOT—I REPEAT—DO NOT simply launch without proper and adequate preparation. This preparation involves MANY MANY things, such as ensuring your team is properly organized by role, or having enough staff in place to handle demand. For the purposes of today’s blog post, we’re going to focus on ensuring your supply chain is functioning properly and that you have adequate inventory on hand.
If you’re putting a product out on the market for sale for the whole world to see, yet you don’t have adequate quantities of the physical goods in stock, nor do you have the proper capacity to acquire more inventory, you’re setting yourself up for disaster.
Launching a viral line of physical consumer goods requires a very different kind of launch than, say, a potentially viral YouTube video or social networking app. If these latter two go viral overnight, you don’t face the same bottlenecks that could jeopardize your business from day one.
If you launch a viral YouTube video or a new viral social networking app, the worst that can happen is that you have dissatisfied viewers or users who are upset because they can’t load your video or webpage due to crashes. You then get your engineers on this problem and they fix it usually within a couple of days.
On the contrary, when you’re selling a $1,500 hoverboard like my former company was and it goes viral overnight, the problems your business faces become much more serious. When Kendall Jenner posts and tags your brand on her Instagram (like she did for us), this results in hundreds of people purchasing your product minutes later. When you walk into your office the next morning (having responded to tens of thousands of Instagram comments) and you see a total of 12 units in stock, trust me, you have some damn serious problems on your hands.
If celebrity influencers are incorporated into your marketing plan right from the start, then your startup better be ready from day one as well. When these celebrities post on your behalf, you’re instantly going to get thousands of people interested in your product. If you’re not ready for that mad rush of traction (which, in our case, came in the form of sales), you and your company are doomed.
Here's what happens if your influencer marketing strategy doesn't align with your startup's structure:
Not having inventory on hand means you'll be on back order from day one.
Extremely agitated customers who call to ask about their order
Customers are disputing their payments when they find out there's a 4- to 8-week wait before their order is shipped, because your supply chain is broken
Annoying conversations with your overseas manufacturer about when to expect your shipment to arrive (they may lie about the delivery date)
This makes the fulfillment process much more difficult, since you don't know what percentage of your customer base has already received their orders.
What happens then is that all these extreme problems for a very young startup begin to snowball week after week, and as soon as you solve one problem, three more have already popped up.
However, if you take the time and effort to get your supply chain in order from the start, things can be different. For instance, you can hire reputable third-party agencies in China to manage your factories’ production levels and facilitate your shipments. Also, you can have another pre-manufactured PO ready for shipment as soon as you give the green light, prior to your launch date.
Max Ringelheim is a 26-year-old seasoned, successful entrepreneur—and, like many others before him, a failed one. After graduating from college, Max co-founded and bootstrapped his own video conferencing technology company called Vonvo.com. After 3.5 years and achieving many milestones—such as raising over $150,000 in angel funding and having his software used at the United Nations—he decided to put Vonvo on hold. He then transitioned into a consulting role for various startup companies in NYC. Some of his most recent consulting roles included serving as an SDR for an ad-tech startup called ListenLoop and being responsible for co-launching the recently acclaimed "Hoverboard Movement." Some of his accomplishments in the hoverboard industry included generating over $1 million in sales revenue in less than 8 weeks and establishing dozens of partnerships with various notable celebrities. Max is now looking for new opportunities with exciting companies where he can leverage his tireless work ethic, extensive network, and viral growth hacking skills.
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