How to launch ideas in 2 hours (Step by step)

The first rule in startup life: “ideas are a dime a dozen”.

People come up with product and service ideas all the time. And the biggest startup fallacy is keeping these ideas a secret - as if anyone has the skills to execute and launch them.

Veteran entrepreneurs who can, already have successful journeys and don’t want to distract themselves with launching new solutions from the ground up.

But if you’re looking for ways to put your idea to the test without spending months in execution, here’s how to launch most ideas in < 2 hours (step by step).

What are executable ideas?

This framework works if you want to test out:

• An ebook/white paper/infographics/digital asset idea

• A service offer (any type of)

• Event (offline or live)

• Newsletter

• Community

• Coaching service

• Some e-commerce funnels

• A publishing site

If you want to test a more complex solution - a complicated product or a SaaS that takes many months to build - it won’t work right away, unless you’re ready to presell seats or test engagement and demand for these (which you can still do using this framework).

The basic framework for launching and testing an idea

Once again, most people vastly overcomplicate the effort it takes to get an idea up and running.

Here are the core pillars of putting your product to a test:

1. Come up with an idea that makes sense in your head

2. Figure out the target market/buyer

3. Craft compelling copy around the idea

4. Build a landing page with a signup/purchase flow

5. Send some traffic

6. Measure interest and conversions

7. Bonus point for A/B testing if it works

Let’s dive into each of these steps separately.

Note: A fully refined professional offer takes months to launch, with expert teams crafting offers, interviewing prospects, warming up audiences, cross-selling via affiliates, leveraging social communities, newsletters, influencers. This simplified framework can serve as a foundation you can build on after testing an idea or two.

1. Coming up with a product idea

This guide focuses primarily on steps 2 through 7 once you have your idea in place already, but let’s assume you want to iterate on your idea generation process.

You can brainstorm through different lenses, including:

• Problems you’re facing yourself that don’t have an obvious solutions

• Resources that aren’t available or popular online yet

• Unique skills/solutions you can provide and break down easily

• Simplifying concepts and data into a course, guide, podcast (you name it)

• Meeting people at events and inquiring pain points they face

• Browsing through reddit, Quora, forums for complaints and questions by folks in different communities

You may end up uncovering an idea or two, but sustainable ideas often revolve around concepts you’re passionate about yourself and would be investing in for years at a time if needed. The Japanese concept of Ikigai definining purpose in life is a great primer in that case:

Narrowing down your idea generation process across the Ikigai concept will get you closer to vocations you can invest in and would rather enjoy, plus infusing your own passion and ideas into that journey.

Once we have the idea in place, let’s move on to the target market.

2. Target market and buyer persona

Once your idea has developed and you want to test it, let’s refine the ideal customer profile (ICP).

A course about Instagram growth or an ebook explaining dropshipping would work differently for high-school students, experienced entrepreneurs, marketing agencies, or investment bankers acquiring companies for millions.

This would shape the narrative, problems and pain points, and the actual value proposition we bring to the table with our resource.

If you speak to everyone, you talk to no one. Laser-focused copy is what makes the difference in shaping up the offer.

Moreover, you want to refine your pricing model (one-off, monthly, lifetime) and costs depending on your value proposition and your prospect's buying power.

Here’s a helpful template from my DevriX marketing team you can print and repurpose for 1 to 3 target customers:

You can start simple and refine further - but what you definitely want to double down is the SWOT analysis for your prospect, particularly their challenges and motivation from the template above.

Humans are triggered by emotions.

Sahil Bloom outlines The Four idols: Money, Power, Pleasure, and Fame. Most people are driven by one strong pursuit and enabling them to accomplish their goal with a powerful incentive is a winning combination.

Let’s move to step 3: crafting the powerful copy.

3. Defining offers that convert

David Ogilvy discovered that five times as many people read the headline compared to the body copy. So writing your headline is worth 80 cents on every ad dollar.

Failing to convert at a headline level (offer) has the biggest impact on the rest of the value proposition on top of the funnel.

The best book on offers I would recommend is Alex Hormozi’s $100M Offers. It’s a stellar book that dives deep into defining strong offers and leveraging powerful content frameworks.

One of Hormozi’s key frameworks is the Value Equation:

The best offers have a powerful dream outcome with a very high likelihood of achievement. They are possible with limited effort and in a short period of time.

These four levers are the ones that make all the difference in the world. Amazon’s “time delay” (fastest deliveries on the market) and “low effort” (one-click purchase) to get any income (affordably) with 100% certainty is one of the reasons they conquered ecommerce years ago.

If you really want to master the full offer experience, get another copy of Sell Like Crazy. Sabri Suby goes over similar concepts with different samples, and supplementing your powerhouse with both books will be of tremendous value not just in pitching your products, but all things sales, value propositions, uncovering new markets, and so much more.

The good news is, there are existing content marketing frameworks like AIDA or FAB or PAS that break down offers into specific sections that have been tried and tested for years. Here’s a brief guide of how content marketing evolved and prime examples of some of these.

You can even feed AIDA to ChatGPT and ask it to structure your offer following that framework. That’s the beauty of using proven methodologies that are well-known and can be applied.

4. Building a landing page with your offer

So far, we’ve got the idea set, the target market cleared out, and an offer following a proven framework and a strong value proposition.

Time to wrap this offer in a beautiful landing page to drive conversions further.

I’ve found that most non-technical founders see that as the biggest pet peeve. The “engineering” part. Expensive R&D and complex teamwork and what not.

After running a digital agency for 14 years and consulting over 400 businesses through Growth Shuttle, here’s the thing:

Agencies and expensive providers are worth it at scale. If you make $3M and want to get to $5M, then investing $100K in a rebrand and rebuild makes sense. $100M brands growing 10% YOY can absolutely justify expert teams profiling in user experience, CRO, tracking conversions, optimizing funnels, you name it.

For small and starting businesses, DIY is the best path forward. Work with a freelancer, consultant, or an advisor if you can afford one - but here’s the starter kit.

There are 3 platforms I can recommend directly for setting up a landing page or a starter site:

1. WordPress

2. OnePage

3. Instapage

WordPress

WordPress is versatile enough to power any web project on the planet (some better than others). The core platform is free - beside the hosting costs to keep it online or any paid add ons (plugins) or themes you may purchase.

Don’t get me wrong - at DevriX we’ve scaled a dozen publishers past 100 million pageviews and some notable enterprises over the years. So ongoing development costs will keep growing with your business. But starting free until you scale is a good value proposition.

Almost all of my websites are built on WordPress (which currently powers 43% of all Internet websites).

As a long-term investment, launching a WordPress website is worth it. It also plays well with the other two tools recommended above. But unlike a self-hosted single page app to test an idea, you’ll end up spending a good amount of time picking designs, configuring contact forms, enabling email accounts and more.

Bottom line, if you’re fully committed:

1. Sign up for a cheap hosting plan with HostMines or a managed WordPress plan with Cloudways

2. Use the automated WordPress installers in the corresponding platform (you can set WordPress up with 3-4 clicks)

3. Get a beautiful free theme for starters from Appearance → Themes or build something with Hello Elementor (with the Elementor page builder)

4. Hook up any email marketing software - or even a simple Contact Form 7 to receive emails for submissions

5. Plug the text into a set of sections

It’s oversimplified, but once you have a set of steps in place and a template, you’d be able to move faster. There are other builders and themes like ThriveThemes or Spectra or Astra or Kadence that include templates and have freemium versions, and thousands of paid themes under $100 that look well.

In the meantime, you can start with one-off pages as well.

OnePage

OnePage is a beautiful landing page builder started in Europe that I recently found through a coaching group friend of mine (thanks Gert!)

The landing page for this newsletter was built with OnePage, along with grow.mariopeshev.com - here’s a sample view:

The builder is super easy to use and most importantly, there are loads of beautiful, long-form templates for longer pages. This was lacking in the market and that’s why I picked this here.

OnePage doesn’t have tons of integrations, but you can hook in Google Analytics, a Meta pixel, and a form embed to Beehiiv (which is what I did as well).

OnePage has a free plan for up to 3 pages that you can test out before upgrading to some power features.

Instapage

Instapage is the big shotgun here, but I can’t omit a tool that brought in nearly 2,000 students to my business accelerator course or 6-figure contracts to our Experimentation as a Service retainers:

Tons of templates and integrations, A/B testing, AI content, triggered popups, HubSpot/Salesforce support and more that would not just be a great tool for your own experiment, but a great addition to your skills for more professional integrations or client work later.

One of my favorite Instapage perks is the ability to connect it to a WordPress site as a separate page, i.e. yoursite.com/new-page. This seamless experience - what I used for the Business Accelerator - looks like a native page in your site vs. setting up a separate domain or subdomain.

It’s ongoing price is $199/mo, but again, it’s an entire engine that does a lot more than most tools out there.

In any case, the process goes as follow: find a template that works, arrange the high converting pages per your sales/offer copy, add some tagging, connect your form or email newsletter subscription, and your tech stack is done!

If you have to connect an offer (like a download), this could be an autoresponder from your email system of choice (MailChimp, beehiiv which powers this newsletter) or a redirect link to a Google Drive or Dropbox hosted file that isn’t indexed elsewhere.

So everyone who makes it to your landing page and submits the info will be considered a lead!

5. Sending traffic to the page

As I said in the previous step 4, most entrepreneurs I meet fear the setup process the most. It feels cumbersome, long, tedious, and outright impossible.

Yes, it takes a while to put all the pieces together the first time, but it’s fairly easy to launch the offer and the page.

The two most complicated steps are this one - generating traffic to the offer - and step 3 - devising a strong offer that really hits a nerve.

Since we’re here, let’s revisit what does traffic encompass.

There are different studies around conversion rates, but a rough industry average is 2% to 3%. This means that, out of a hundred relevant visitors, 2 or 3 will submit a form.

The number can vary a lot across industries and audiences, and of course, depending on whether it’s a free funnel (a sign up to an email list) or an expensive service (very low conversion right off the bat). But let that serve as a primer.

Since you’re in the process of TESTING an idea, the lower the threshold, the better.

• If you’re selling services, base your landing page on a free resource or booking a call. This doesn’t request an upfront payment.

• If you’re assessing needs, also go for a questionnaire or a 30-min consulting call. It’s free value in exchange of identifying problems.

• If you’re selling a course, base your lander on a free sample or a shorter video walking through the curriculum.

• Expensive propositions could be wrapped as a free webinar or a live event.

These workarounds will increase your conversion rates while moving more people to direct interactions with you - increasing the odds of making a sale later.

So where do you gather traffic?

• Reaching out to friends, former colleagues, asking for intros, DMs on LinkedIn and Twitter

• Social networks - organic reach and promos (multiple times)

• SEO if you have anything going already (a blog)

• Paid ads (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)

• Community groups like reddit or Quora

• Facebook groups, Slack communities, Discord groups (without being spammy)

• Email newsletter (personal or asking friends for a favor to share)

Again, promotion is usually the hardest and most expensive part of the journey. There are organic channels that work if you have established your digital presence and have any form of community. Otherwise, starting your journey sooner will help you push along when the time comes.

6. Measure interest and conversions

Once you get some traffic flowing, all of the aforementioned tools will help you count traffic and conversions (email submissions).

You want to tag along the 2-3% conversion rate if possible (higher is great) and caibrate based on that.

If the offer doesn’t appear to perform as well, clone the page several times and test different pain points and promises. You need to trigger the emotional need that justifies a subscription or purchase. Just make sure you can deliver to the promise.

7. A/B Testing

A/B testing is the process of running the same page with variations such as:

• Headline copy

• Call to action button copy

• Colors

• Images

• Contact form vs. booking form vs. a phone number

Large businesses invest heavily in conversion rate optimization (CRO) because they have a repeatable growth channel (like ads, email, social) and want to maximize conversions.

If you run a single page, you want to leverage the options accordingly.

For OnePage and Instapage, you should have A/B testing bundled in.

If you go for WordPress, one of the best players in the A/B testing market is VWO.

VWO is a truly professional tool, but they also offer a free starter plan which covers A/B testing, URL tests, various parallel tests, a visual and code editor for your own site (on top of WordPress) and tons of flexibility.

Once you have some traffic running, it’s a great companion in your toolset.

Happy launching

While we’re past the 2,600 words mark for this guide, it’s a repeatable and consistent checklist for launching your product ideas.

Professional agencies employ a longer, more resilient process, identifying competitors, leveraging emotional triggers in design and user experience, building longer funnels through different channels and so forth.

But learning this framework will make it possible to launch experiments under 2 hours.

Once you’ve signed up for all the tools and have the core framework set, it’s a matter of a light ChatGPT work for copy generation, a few Unbounce free images for the landing pages, picking a template, and launching the test.

Let me know how it goes. And if you enjoy the guide, share it with a friend to make their life easier.

Mario