'Tis the season to be launching: Five tips for launching your business

Fred Schebesta, founder of Finder.com says the bigger the launch the better. Photo: Nic Walker

While many would-be entrepreneurs are taking the next few weeks off to celebrate "all their hard work" over the past year, I present a challenge to you: that business idea that you've been testing and mulling over? Put down the pumpkin-spiced latte and push your idea live right now. I say this because the festive season is one of the best times to push a brand live and it be super relevant to your audience – provided you do it right.

Here are a few guidelines, and some insights from what I learnt when I recently launched finder.com:

You really need to go all out here – a mediocre launch spells a mediocre brand.  

Treat your brand like a celebrity

The cornerstone of any marketing campaign – especially a brand launch – is to hype up the newcomer. This can be accelerated through actual celebrity presence, such as the key guest at finder.com's launch into the US market – Reggie Brown, AKA the world's best Obama impersonator – whom we flew into Sydney for our launch party. This lime-light needs to be aggressively exaggerated, so that when people's memory of your launch fades, your team is still remembered for having killer delivery.

Treat your existing audience like celebrities

If you think you don't already have an audience, I'm telling you now that you're wrong. The people that interact with your team members, the people in the industry that you know by association and the media contacts you've been trying to clinch – they're all people you should care about right now, and what better way to sink your teeth in than by inviting them to your biggest event yet? You really need to go all out here – a mediocre launch spells a mediocre brand. Especially near the end of the year, people want sterling quality memories of the brands – and people – they interact with.

When finder.com launched, we hosted a massive party in one of Sydney's most reputable event venues, and treated journalists, media, clients and friends to a night of live music, chauffeured Tesla rides, open bar and custom American food stalls, including a DIY Banana Split Stall. This delivery is testament to the fact that you need to launch in a familiar space with people who will care about keeping in touch, and most importantly, treat them like royalty.

Serving up a half-assed dinner to a bunch of people you've never met? Looks like you're launching a crappy business.

It's all about buildup and anticipation

If you've read the previous point and immediately thought about the financial expenses involved, this point could ease your headache somewhat. You don't have to be shelling out consistently, and in fact you shouldn't, because perhaps more-so than the final delivery, humans inherently love anticipation.

The way to do this without seeming drawn-out is to push out just one key play for the three stages of delivery: the initial whispers, the hyped discussion and the launch. For our launch, for example, we had Reggie "Obama" Brown post a video announcing his trip to Australia long before we had started building hype, causing the initial "what was that?" questions in our unsuspecting audience.

Once he had landed, we entered stage two of the delivery by securing live TV coverage of Reggie and I walking the streets and chatting to passers-by, directly inserting the key personalities of our launch into the crowd we were hyping up, with genuine emotion they understood. These kinds of positive emotion flood your audience at this time of the year.

It all came to a crescendo at the launch party, and while some may only register the party itself as the event, I can bet they actually experienced an aspect of our event in the lead up, which contributed to their memories of finder.com . Now is the time to tap into those memory-making moments, during the season of celebration.

Once you've launched, it's heads down

It's easy to focus on the social element of your launch (granted it is a lot of fun), but always remember that you're launching a business here, and businesses are a tidal wave of relentless, focused effort. Once you've shown your audience that you know how to have a good time and be super relevant to their everyday, you then need to show them that you are capable of producing quality goods and services. Nobody wants to be the CEO of an average brand that just parties all the time (for the short time they can fund such a lifestyle). While it is the festive season, if you can't deliver on your promise of quality and consistency of services, you'll lose money – and people will quickly find someone else to celebrate with.

Fred Schebesta is the co-founder of finder.com.au and finder.com.

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