Launch Lessons from Blake Haney on HumidBeings

• February 12th, 2009 /
•  Chris Schultz

I stopped by the “Group Think” that SENO held last night with local entrepreneur Blake Haney. You may have heard that his ambitious new project, HumidBeings is launching in beta later this month.

One of the biggest mistakes that I have made, and I coach others on is not following the “if you build it they will come” strategy of launching a project. (There is always an exception to the rule, in this case Brian Bordainick’s 9th Ward Field of Dreams Project. But I digress…) In the fight for mind share on the web, you will always be the tree that falls in the forest and doesn’t make a sound. You’ve got to make some noise!

Blake has had his head down building out the site, and he was open about the challenges he’s faced with funding it through client work, and distractions from his other business Dirty Coast. It’s clearly been a 2+ years labor of love, and he’s getting close.

But, let me dispel the notion that he is launching this month. He launched last night in front of 40 people, and he has been launching for the last six months.

Here are some lessons that I am taking from his launch:

• Following the “launch early and often” mantra, he’s has had teaser site up for over six months and he’s collected over 2000 email addresses for interested beta users.
• He’s been very visible publicly and is engaging his target market, the New Orleans community, in the development of Humid Beings, and will continue to even after he opens the doors. He makes it feel as if its being built for us, a gift to the community, and I believe it.
• Running a targeted banner ad campaign to build brand awareness even before he opens the doors. The audience for Humid Beings hangs out on sites like Gambit’s Best of New Orleans right now, so he’s running ads there.
• Leveraging Dirty Coast by getting stickers out there.
• Partnering in different ways with local talent like Ben Reece and Supasaint. He’s building content and building a halo for his brand around cool content producers.
• Identified 85 local blogs that are going to provide content to Humid. They get to blog on their own sites, and the content gets pulled in through RSS to a place where it will hopefully have more conversation around it.
• Identifying “the villian” NOLA.com so that we can root for him against a identified competitor.

Of course, I have some additional thoughts on what I think he could be doing:

• Follow Guy Kawasaki’s success with Alltop of feeding blogger ego’s by giving them a badge to identify themselves as “featured bloggers” or “founding partners” on their own blog. Make this invite only, with an perception of exclusivity. (Blake, what I am trying to say is give me a HumidBeings badge to put on Voodoo saying I’ve been “selected” to provide content… free advertising.)
• Get on Twitter. You should be all over this already, tweeting out content, building followers. Twitter is the best medium for launching a brand in a personal, transparent way. You need a Twitter strategy if you don’t have one already… let’s talk.

PS: Blake, I’m cybersquatting for you. In my research of discovering you aren’t on Twitter, I found that you handn’t registered @humidbeings. Twitter handles are the new domain names. So, I thoughtfully registered it for you as FakeBlakeHaney, and I will happily turn it over when you read this post and hit me up in the comments below. Unless some other commenter can convince me to turn it over to them.

• categories: All, Entrepreneurship, New Orleans /
• tags: blakehaney, humidbeings, launchlessons