Don’t blow the last chapter of your launch

Launches are like dinner parties — and they can be ruined the same way.

Let’s do a quick visualization here for setup: 

You’re hosting a holiday dinner party. You put thought and care into every step, from sending out beautiful invitations, to planning an exquisite menu, to cooking each dish to perfection and setting a lovely table. Your guests arrive with watering mouths. They know you’re an excellent cook, and their excitement for the meal has been growing since they got their invite. 

They sit down at the table, their anticipation at a peak thanks to the delicious aromas in the air — but then they see that in lieu of a fork, you’ve set their place with… a hammer. 

Absurd, right? Who would go to the effort of planning and preparing a meal so thoughtfully, only to provide the completely wrong implement for guests to actually partake in it? Sure, some will probably still eat. But it’ll be a painful process. Choosing the wrong tool ruins the whole experience, right at that crucial moment when all of your efforts are about to pay off. 

It sounds ridiculous, and yet in the world of high-heat commerce, it happens all the time.

The wrong tool for the job

We see it again and again as marketers, but also as fans. A brand does everything right from the start: they build a feverish following, they develop a killer product, they tease it expertly — content, media buys, influencers, the whole shebang. Fans get hyped, they mark their calendars, and show up on release day ready to buy. 

And then they’re given a hammer instead of a fork.

Maybe the site crashes over and over. Maybe fans spend hours in waiting rooms. When they get through, they’re smashing ‘Add to Cart’ and typing in their credit card number as fast as they can — just to see those three dreaded words: Out. Of. Stock. Or even worse, maybe they get that order confirmation… followed by a cancellation because the brand’s tech was out of sync and they oversold. It’s the worst kind of heartbreak.

Adding insult to injury, the coveted product then appears on resale sites for quadruple the original price. Someone’s figured out a way to use those hammers, but it isn’t the brands’ real followers who want to enjoy the product. In fact, it’s an army of automated hammers built to smash fans’ hopes.

Which then begs the question from the followers: does this brand even care about me? If they did, why would they set me up to fail like this? 

Bad experiences leave a lasting bad taste

Back to our dinner table. How does the evening play out? Some people might leave on the spot, and some may stay and deal with the inconvenience out of love for you, the host, and their anticipation for that delicious meal you cooked. They were really excited, after all, and they still want to get a taste.

But when they look back on that night and tell their friends about it, they won’t remember the delicious food and great company. They’ll be like, “I can’t believe they made me eat with a hammer. That sucked!” And they’ll definitely think twice before accepting another invitation to your table, no matter how enticing you make it sound.

The same happens in the world of fandoms and hype commerce. Sure, your product will sell out, and your most diehard fans will still get their hands on it (although likely from an auction website at a steep markup). But they won’t remember any part of the process fondly.

No matter how good your execution is, if the experience sucks when it comes time to engage with your brand in the commerce channel, people will be more pissed off than energized. And they won’t have nice things to say about it.

Instead, they’ll say things like:

Is that really what you want your fans to be saying after youve just put in all that effort leading up to your launch?

Serve up a better experience

EQL is working hard to retire the excuse for poor launches, removing the need for brands to spend launch day stressing out, waiting for the moment that all their hard work falls apart as chaos ensues.

Sure, it hasn’t always been easy. Retailers have been working with the tools that were available, and scammers have only found increasingly sophisticated ways to buy up products and make a buck at the expense of all the real fans.

But EQL was built specifically for high-heat launches, using infinitely scalable infrastructure to manage traffic spikes, and advanced entry analysis tech to filter out bots and scammers, reward real fans, and keep everything fair (and fun!). We were designed for launches the way forks were designed for eating.

We didn’t even stop there. We support brands even after the launch is done, providing essential insights that will make planning easier next time, and offering opportunities to continue engaging with fans and bringing them back again and again.

It’s the tool you need at every phase: before, during, and after your launch. 

Does that make us a spork? Because we’re cool with that. 

(Fun fact: Although there is some debate, we believe there is sufficient evidence showing the spork originated in Australia. Just like EQL.)