Why You Should Do Three Launches
This mostly focuses on tech and online businesses. It may or may not apply to other types of businesses. YMMV.
Every time I work on a new project or business, I aim to do at least three launches. This was the strategy I went with for my first startup, though not intentionally, and it worked so well that I've been using this strategy ever since.
Once you validate an idea and build your Minimum Useful Product (MUP), you should do an alpha launch to roughly 35-50 people (this will be wildly different if your business is a B2B). The goal here is to get a small subset of customers to try your product and give you feedback to improve and polish your MUP.
One way to do this, and it's what I do, is to use a basic feedback board that allow customers to submit feature requests (or bug fixes). The requests are visible to everyone and people can upvote what they want prioritized. The request that gets the most upvotes is the one that we will often prioritize as the thing to build. Once you've exhaust this list with your alpha group, you'll do a second launch, your beta launch. This should jump from roughly 35-50 people to roughly 250-300 people. Here, you'll repeat the process of gathering feedback and upvotes, and polish and refine the product again.
Finally, after two smaller private launches and up to 300 people helping you with feedback to polish your product well, you'll do your public launch. You'll already have around 250-300 early adopters already who are fans of your product at this point and are willing to help get the word out, give early testimonials, etc... to help you gain traction.
You don't have to follow this exact process or stick to just 3 launches (maybe you want to do 4 with a public waitlist strategy as your 3rd for example), but the idea behind private small scale launches to improve the product before it goes mainstream is an idea that works really well.
If you think about Facebook's own story, you'll realize they did something similar. First to Harvard only, then to Ivy League and top Universities only, then to all other colleges, eventually high schools, then to companies, and eventually to the rest of the world. There is a lot of value in doing smaller launches, refining, before you do a public launch. It's a method that has worked well for me over the years and I highly recommend it to everyone.
