#launchsky

There must be something in the air when users pitch their ideas on LaunchSky, because we have another launched product that's ready for some love! Whether you are ready or not to take the 'plunge,' the importance of getting feedback is continually being validated by our increasing number of launched ideas.

Our newest product comes from Cory, who co-founded Datelivery with his wife. Datelivery is a monthly date idea subscription box, providing planned out dates to enjoy in the comfort of your home.

Before Cory and his wife decided to pitch their idea, Datelivery wasn't even on the radar.

"We signed up with hopes that at some point we could leverage the community to validate any future startup ideas we had."

But just as love can sometimes come as a surprise, so did their idea. Like many other entrepreneurs, they found a problem, and figured out a way to fix it for themselves and other couples alike.

"We said we wouldn't allow date night to become routine, so we started creating our own unique at-home date nights."

As a result, Datelivery was born. Throughout the process of validating and developing their idea to the point of launching, they learned a lot through pitching on LaunchSky.

#1: There is no such thing as a "perfect" time or scenario.

You'll never know if your idea is worth it if you don't pitch it.

#2: Feedback reflects what your consumers want.

Their most visited page on their website came from comments in Launchsky.

#3: LaunchSky is a no-risk platform to put your idea out there.

We make it easy and problem-free to get feedback on your ideas.

Like you, we are contantly improving our product, and love your feedback. If you have anything you want to see on LaunchSky, shoot us an email. We are so proud of Datelivery, and wish the same success on all of our users.

Read the full Datelivery interview:

Datelivery is a monthly subscription box, focused on providing unique date night experiences for couples to enjoy in the comfort of their homes.

Each month, subcribers receive a themed date night delivered to your door, planned out for your and your mate.

What inspired you to start Datelivery?

After we got married, one piece of advice we received was “to never stop dating,” and that stuck with us. We wouldn’t allow for “date night” to turn into a routine dinner and a movie on the couch; or even worse completely stop; therefore, we started creating our own novel at home date nights. 

How did LaunchSky help you validate your idea? 

After our idea was posted, we immediately began to receive extremely positive feedback from the community that let us know our idea was a good idea and something people could see themselves using. Even when we received comments that were not 100% positive, they always came with great feedback and all seemed to fit the same theme; therefore, allowing us to take the feedback and immediately apply it to our idea and make adjustments. Prior to launching we did not plan to have a "past boxes" page (to see date nights we offered), but based on the feedback we received from Launchsky, we ended up adding one to our site. To date, analytics has shown that this page is the most visited page on our site! 

How important is continued feedback to your product?

Continued feedback is invaluable with our particular business model. Each month, we take on the daunting task of completely planning a unique and fun date night that is going to appeal to a mass number of couples. Those couples are all different and unique themselves, so feedback we get from them helps us to tailor the date nights towards our customer base each month. Feedback also lets us know when we’ve hit or missed the mark with a particular date night/theme and what we can do differently, do better, or simply continue to do.

Any lessons learned that you would be willing to share with other Launchskyers? 

The greatest lesson we can pass along is to not wait or allow fear, the unknown or waiting for the perfect idea or scenario to come along to launch your idea. It will never come! We have wanted to be entrepreneurs for so long and kicked around so many good ideas, but we continued to find reasons not to move forward each time. It wasn’t until we came up with Datelivery, and finally decided it was now or never that we took the plunge. If you’re not 100% sure about your idea, LaunchSky is the perfect no-risk platform to simply put the idea out there to a great community and begin collecting feedback and validating your idea. From there, you can decide if the idea is something real people would want to use and or pay for and then move forward or revise your idea.

Are you feeling the love?

Visit https://www.datelivery.com and get your romance on demand box, delivered before Valentine's Day!

Got an idea? Here's another way to test it.

To get a closer look, feel free to download an original here, or click on the image to enlarge.

Feeling good about your idea? Send us an email at [email protected] with your flowchart answers for an awesome discount.

Go ahead, share away!

LaunchSky is the brain-child of a technology consultancy / product incubator called DarwinApps.

When we first started, we didn't just want to build a consulting shop. We wanted to consult for profit (and to learn), and to use those profits to finance our own products.

Well, we tried and we failed. We failed a few times. We learned some lessons that we've built right into LaunchSky from day 1.

First, we created WeeRL: A way (browser plugin) to communicate on any URL. (get it? WeeRL :)). Problem: We didn't know the first thing about a product market fit.

Next, we created WeePick: A web app for decisions anywhere, anytime, for anything. We were better designers, and better developers, but the product-market fit piece of it still didn't really click. Problem: Product-market fit was still a mystery, and we didn't know how to market.

Then we created YulGo: An event planning tool that tried to solve our own problems (ride sharing, money splitting). Here's what it looks like if you don't feel like signing up.  Problem: We got better at solving our OWN problems, but not the problems of others. We also still had no idea how to market.

We were repeating the same mistakes.

We knew that we could design and build just about anything, but we had no idea if we were building something that people actually wanted.

Was this solving a real problem for people?

Will someone give their time, money, or attention to the product?

Will anyone look at, or share, our product?

So then we added on another project: LaunchSky.

We didn't even build the product. We just put together some designs that looked like a product, and everything else that comes with a "coming soon" page.

We put a link on HackerNews, and we had over 3,000 sign-ups in the first week.

It seemed that we weren't the only ones who had trouble figuring out "is this idea worth building?".

But it's not just about an idea. It's not just about marketing. It's not just about a product-market fit. It's not just about distribution. It's about everything individually, and about the sum-of-the-parts all at once.

We were hoping LaunchSky would help people figure out: is this a good idea? Now, we're hoping LaunchSky will evolve into something that helps people validate ideas, and grow a user-base of interested customers, collaborators, and ad-hoc advisors that can help bring an idea through the many phases it will undoubtedly go through in becoming something real.

We've still got a long way to go, and we genuinely hope LaunchSky will help you validate, improve on, and iterate over your ideas (or existing products).

And we're still figuring out our long-term business model, but currently - a submission (with plenty of new eyes, comments, and a feature in our newsletter) costs 19$. If you're passionate about your idea, but have any financial concerns, just email me and we'll figure something out.

Products are really hard to get right. There's design, development, marketing, luck, and a million other things to worry about. Products do have one thing in common however: they all start with an idea.

Ideas can be difficult to convey. You're taking something intangible (in your mind) and trying to create it into something other humans (your partners or your customers) can understand. This is not easy.

Our hope is that the organization of a pitch on LaunchSky gives people new to the process of creating a product (or coming back for another try) an organized format to convey their idea across. For those brave enough to have pitched, you know what visuals part of the pitch looks like: 

The visuals are likely the most important part, at least for drawing attention from the LaunchSky community (Do you look at the pictures first or do you start reading?)

Many of the best apps (or companies) in the world were not started by designers, but we're confident that whoever was steering the boat eventually learned to see eye-to-eye with design.

If you ever take your pitch and make it into a real product, you're going to have to design it yourself or get really good at communicating your ideas and ambitions to the right designer.

Learn to sketch. There's nothing like giving a wireframe, and the key problems that screen is trying to solve for a user, to a designer. That way, the designer can do what they do best.

We've put together LaunchSky sketch pitch templates for your ideas. They're already preset to 508x288 pixels.

You can start your sketches here, and design them further before you pitch -- or just take some photos of your sketches and load them up.

p.s. - LaunchSky's 3rd most successful pitch to date, ServicePanel, was conveyed with "mere" hand sketches.