What do you find most challenging about launching a new product that is also your company's first product?

Building an audience. It's hard when your company is new and people don't know what you're about, why they should care and often very little credibility. Best way to combat that is to start building an audience earlier than your launch. Start talking about the problem you are solving with your product. You don't have to talk about your product. But you can establish thought leadership for your brand by doing this. Maybe it's just LinkedIn, or maybe a podcast or maybe something else. But your launch won't work if you don't have an audience to go share the news with. 

Most often when you're launching the company's first product, you're most likely launching the company as well. The challenge there is its the first for everything. So, make sure you have a comprehensive launch plan as there are a lot of moving parts.

Plus, make sure you define the key metrics to define success, often times this can be a challenge for team. 

How do you think about:

Awareness: organic search traffic, PR/comms strategy, social engagement

Growth: KPIs for the business around MQLs, demos, website conversions, etc

Impact: Revenue, retention, etc.

The most challenging piece here is that you're flying with little internal data. You're operating based on assumptions. You can create pretty business plans with ideas of traffic, lead, and demo conversions but you're only in the game once you get your first sale. From there you can learn more intimately of why they bought, how they made their decision, who was part of it, and what needs they are looking to meet.

My advice here is to always build an MVP, test, validate your hypothesis before you code or create the product. Create a mock, get some feedback, make changes, gauge intent to buy etc.

Invest minimally until you can see that you're getting traction, and then scale as quickly as you can. As Reid Hoffman said, if you're not embarrassed by you're first product, you launched to late.

Getting all teams to hum along is the hardest part. A successful product launch is not just a product marketer’s job. It’s a team activity. Product marketing plays the quarterback, with support from Customer Success, Sales, Product, Support, and the rest of marketing. Getting everyone on the same page and sending a cohesive experience to your audience is a tough challenge. Influencing other teams and leading without authority is an important career skill for product marketers to develop.

I think this one all comes down to your framework. If you have a good framework that you've used in the past and a task management tool (like Asana, Jira, etc.), you're over halfway there. But the biggest thing is to socialize the framework with execs and your cross-functional launch team early. Get buy-in on the process and make sure that each launch contributor has a clear understanding of their role and responsibilities as part of the launch. Since it will be your company's first product launch, this will be new to everyone so you need to be flexible and may have to do a little extra hand-holding to get things over the line. Kickoff calls and weekly check-ins are a good way to make sure that everyone stays on-task and on-time.