How to launch a product in 24 hours

April 4, 2022

Outline

A couple of months ago, our head of growth, Adam Vazquez, saw a tweet by venture capitalist Sam Thompson about his experience building an online counseling service in 24 hours.

Adam wanted to see what he could do, how he could replicate a similar project and success story, so he started and launched a software product in just 24 hours. Here’s how he did it.

#1 — Imagine a product that fulfills a need

Before any action can be taken, you must first have a sustainable idea, meaning one that lines up your skillset and someone else’s need. What are you good at? What do you do? How can your strengths fill in where there is a lack?

Adam already had an idea mulling in the back of his mind:

There are a lot of marketers who want to get attention online. We’re past “content marketing is a good idea” and on to how it is actual currency, as demonstrated by the amount of business that can be generated through it, the Web 3.0 wave, NFTs, and all these other things we’re seeing.

Content is currency and there are a lot of people who want to be able to build content. However, while they may have ideas, they might not be able to execute at a high level, hence the need for a service that meets their need.

#2 — Set up basic tools

To get some legs under your idea, you’re going to want to set up a few light tools. You can find a lot of these for free or at least inexpensively. The route Adam took ended up costing him less than $50.

  • A domain. Whether you use Webflow, Wix, or WordPress, go ahead and create an account and choose a template
  • A Stripe account. This is a way to receive money on the internet
  • A custom type form. This acts as the customer support or salesperson for a new customer

Setting up these tools and possibly spending a little money will help motivate you not to give up on the idea when you get tired or have something more pressing to do. By putting a little money and/or effort into your project, you’ll have more desire to continue.

#3 — Create a value proposition

Once Adam had all of those pieces in place, he wrote out a value proposition using the “unique selling proposition” method. This format asks you to fill out a formula:

We help [the target customer] achieve [the ideal outcome] with [the product or service].

To give you an example, Adam said, “We help marketers get their customers’ attention on social media by creating fast viral quality content out of their existing assets.”

His product will be designed for marketers to upload their “boring” content so we can turn it into something that’s worthy of watching.

#4 — Determine your pricing

Pricing was pretty easy for Adam to figure out. His goal was to make a product that could generate $5,000 a month (that’s generally one customer for us).

Based on what Adam needs to pay our editors for the actual work, this puts the charge at about $299 per piece of content.

If customers submit 123 pieces of content, their average cost will be about $500. Therefore, Adam only needs 10 customers for this to make sense as a business model. That’s very doable.

#5 — Write out product descriptions

Adam went on to write the actual product descriptions and used all the information in those to build a type form with some conditional logic that acts as the customer support and salesperson for a new customer.

Now, when a new customer comes to our eventual site, they can order, upload their asset, pay for the service, and eventually get delivery of the content through the site and the connected type form, which is tied to our bank account via Stripe.

#6 — Put together your visual components

Now Adam had all the building blocks in place but needed to put together the visual components of the site. Being more wordsy than visual, he stuck to the basics by using a free Webflow template for the site and Canva for the logo. Building all of that out took a couple of hours.

#7 — Finishing touches

At about the 12-15 hour mark from when Adam started, he still had some details to get to, like replacing the filler content and making FAQs, but the site was about 90% done.

At this point, Adam sent the site to a number of friends and a business partner who could provide feedback and expose blind spots. Our technical lead also jumped in and helped tweak the look of the site before we launched.

#8 — Launch

Finally, right at the 24-hour mark, we were ready to go. We built and shipped an entire software product: a website tied together with some light tools and a product that transforms boring content into viral-worthy content.

If you want to check it out, it’s Ceemoh.com, kind of like CMO, it’s your personal content assistant.

Next Steps

Now, there is still a manual component to it. There are editors on our side who have to take the content and turn it around in 48 hours, but we took this thing that didn’t exist, build it up, and ship it out in 24 hours.

We’re still testing a few things and only accepting orders from “friendly” customers (which you, appreciated reader, are a part of). We also plan on using Facebook and Instagram ads to drive traffic.

Right now Adam wants to improve the Ceemoh experience so that it’s really usable, very intuitive, easy to understand what the outputs are, and make sure we as a team give it enough attention so it will survive.

That’s where we’re at. That was the product Adam created in 24 hours. If you want to check it out and let him know what you think, feel to contact him at adam@trustheard.com.