Why You Shouldn’t Cold Launch a Product

Oct 27, 2026

—

Four years ago, I tried to start a yarn business.

I love knitting and crochet, and I wanted to dye custom colors for other knitters. The indie dyer community is big, and I wanted to be a part of it in a bigger way. I didn’t just want to buy the yarn and create designs with it. I wanted others to create with something I created.

Yarn I dyed and knitted into this shawl.

It didn’t work. In four years, I made about $1,000 in sales. So you can image, after supplies and time put in, I didn’t even brake even.

How I approached the business

I picked colors that matched movies and books I was reading. They were colors I wanted to make. I never asked what knitters wanted to buy. Social media wasn’t something I took seriously, either. I posted, but I didn’t market myself or try to get to know the people I was making the product for.

Looking back, I made the yarn first and hoped the audience would show up and buy without much effort on my part. That was a cold launch.

What Weixin did differently

Then I read the case study in my textbook Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change by Mahoney and Tang, about Weixin, a Chinese app where people message friends, read news, shop and even book a cab.

Weixin didn’t get big by accident. It put real work into understanding its audience and decided who it was building for. It targeted young people who lived in cities and owned smartphones, and built a platform around them. To fit what those users needed, Weixin kept adding new features. Right before Chinese New Year, it launched a virtual version of the red envelope, the gift of money people give family and friends on holidays. Nearly 5 million people joined in.

Photo from pexels.com by Dany and Devy Snown

That is the oppsite of what I did. Weixin started by finding its people first. I threw spaghetti at the wall and hoped it would stick.

Life of an Author

The life of an author is not all about writing great books. Whether you go traditional or indie, you have to market yourself and your books.

Authors are told to find out where their audience is before the book is finished. That means you start with the readers of your genre and market yourself early. Once the book is written, you find the readers the book fits. Skip the first step and you end up with a cold launch.

This time I’m starting with readers

This time I did the part I skipped. I found where my readers are, and I show up there. I talk about my work in progress as I go, so the people who will read my book see it come together.

The goal is that when the book is finally finished, I’m not doing another cold launch. With the yarn, I had a finished product and nobody waiting for it. This time I’m building the audience while I write.

If you’re making something right now, a book, a craft, a business, do you know who it’s for?

Comments

4 responses to “Why You Shouldn’t Cold Launch a Product”

donelsonmarloy

October 28, 2026

Hi Nicole, I really liked how honest this post was. “A finished product and nobody waiting for it” is a line a lot of us can relate to.

Your point that Weixin found its audience first matches what I took from the case. I’d add that Weixin also met its audience inside a tradition they already cared about. The red envelope feature worked because it turned an existing Chinese New Year habit into something digital and fun, so it didn’t feel like a new product launch at all. Botha and Reyneke (2013) found that people share content when it feels relevant to them first, and the red envelopes were about as relevant as it gets.

That’s why I think your plan to share your work-in-progress is smart. One idea: you could make readers part of the process, not just an audience watching it. Maersk Line did something similar on LinkedIn by inviting customers into discussion groups that helped shape new services (Katona & Sarvary, 2014). For a novel, that might mean polls on character names or a vote between two covers.

Where do readers in your genre spend the most time: BookTok, Instagram, or somewhere else?

References:
Botha, E., & Reyneke, M. (2013). To share or not to share: The role of content and emotion in viral marketing. Journal of Public Affairs, 13(2).
Katona, Z., & Sarvary, M. (2014). Maersk Line: B2B social media—“It’s communication, not marketing.” California Management Review, 56(3), 142–156.

Loading…

Reply
suzette.tidmore

November 2, 2026

Hi Nicole!

I enjoyed reading your post! I think we’ve all had moments where we were so excited about an idea that we assumed everyone else would be, too. I appreciated your honesty about your experience with the yarn business and how it’s influenced your approach to launching your novel. Your experience also reminded me of Mahoney and Tang’s (2017) discussion about understanding consumer behavior and building relationships through social media. It’s interesting how much we can learn from an experience that didn’t go quite as planned. I’m curious whether you’ve noticed a difference in audience interest now that you’re approaching your launch differently.

Reference

Mahoney, L. M., & Tang, T. (2017). Strategic social media: From marketing to social change. Wiley Blackwell.

-S. Tidmore

Loading…

Reply
suzette.tidmore

November 2, 2026

Hi Nicole!

I enjoyed reading your post! I think we’ve all had moments where we were so excited about an idea that we assumed everyone else would be, too. I appreciated your honesty about your experience with the yarn business and how it’s influenced your approach to launching your novel. Your experience also reminded me of Mahoney and Tang’s (2017) discussion about understanding consumer behavior and building relationships through social media. It’s interesting how much we can learn from an experience that didn’t go quite as planned. I’m curious whether you’ve noticed a difference in audience interest now that you’re approaching your launch differently.

Reference

Mahoney, L. M., & Tang, T. (2017). Strategic social media: From marketing to social change. Wiley Blackwell.

-Suzette Tidmore

Loading…

Reply
Jackson Frazier

November 5, 2026

Hi Nicole,

Super interesting to read how your intentions shifted when releasing a book! I believe that authors never stop growing in their ability. It’s very cool to see how the perspective of the case study has contributed to this.

As you discussed in your post, Weixin’s success was largely based on how they saw the needs from their audience. As stated by Mahoney and Tang (2016), “if an audience can get all they want on one platform, why bother to find other options.”

Weixins innovation of new features is very similar to Apple’s iPhone where they have been able to incorporate many features into one device The iPhone has also evolved beyond it’s original purpose and has now become an everyday staple in people’s lives.

Both Weixin and Apple serve as a great reminder that successful platforms don’t always receive their success from one standout feature. In the growing age of the 4th industrial revolution, people expect innovation.

Thanks for the great read!

References

Mahoney, L. M., & Tang, T. (2016). Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change. Wiley Global Research (STMS). https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9781118556900

Loading…

Reply