ready fire aim

Should you launch first, then adjust your plan?

It’s so bloody easy to launch a product these days. Find a need, exploit the need, get a website, send a few emails, and you’re launched.

Is it really that easy? Should it be?

Or should you wait – plan, plan some more, sit on the sidelines watching others make mistakes?

We think the “Ready, Fire, Aim” approach is back with a vengeance.

We’re not saying the plan is dead. We’re not advocating “Fire, Ready, Aim” either.

Two cases in point, from our experiences here at Area 224 HQ.

One is the book idea “Nichification” – which is taking longer to get off the ground than we would have hoped. (The “we” is myself and Jim Alexander.)

We conceived the idea in the Winter and proceeded to conduct dozens of interviews with people, from a variety of places and walks of life, all of whom had one thing in common — a niche business. We got help from a professional writer (Jody Calkins from Emery Road, who I would recommend highly). We had discussions with publishers – not just the “fill out the form and we’ll get back to you” stuff, but actual discussions with publishers about real book deals.

So we’ve got content. We’ve got a concept. We’ve got a few chapters. But we don’t yet have the book. Why?

We have to adjust our aim.

Part of the aim adjustment process involves that dreaded word “Objective.” The objective of the book is NOT to sell it and make a zillion dollars in royalties from selling the book. The objective of the book IS…well, that’s the thing that we’re fine-tuning.

But there’s another example, too…

We see a need (and actually a niche within a niche, one of the themes we’ve heard over and over in the book interviews) for professional communicators and marketers in the energy industry to connect, to share ideas, to learn about best practices.

Having spent some time working in the energy industry and working with Realtors on things like “green” and “LEED” marketing — well, there’s a hook here.

So we fired — you can see the Facebook Group here — and we’ll adjust the aim as time goes by.

What’s the point?

You could probably point to a thousand examples of companies that launched product X thinking it would fill need Y and make Z money; only to find out that product X does A+B-C and the money is somewhere in the middle of the alphabet.

But you could point to 100,000 examples of the guy sitting at the bar saying “I had the idea back in the 90s to create…”

Ready? Fire! Aim.