The case for launching your own product as an SME - mine your support tickets, start the website a year before the product, and maybe let the next generation run it.
tl;dr
Most products don't fail because they're bad. They fail because nobody arrives to judge them. If you're launching a product - your website should exist a year before it, as an advisory site that happens to eventually sell. What follows is the case for launching - the company is made up, the advice is real. As with everything on the internet - do validate via 3 different sources to make sure it's correct :)
The case for launching
Say there's a company - let's call them Everyday Goods Co. Been distributing personal care products for 15 years, decent revenue, solid client base. Not a startup - a real business that knows its market.
And here's what 15 years of selling other people's products teaches you - which ones flatter to deceive. Everyday Goods didn't need a market research firm. Their customers had been telling them for years - in support tickets, in reorder patterns, in the products that get bought once and never again. They knew exactly which products in their category are low NPS - promised a lot, delivered little.
So one day they decide - we know what's broken, we know what customers actually want, let's launch our own product. One that actually works.
Their instinct - what almost every established company does - finish the product, then launch. Press release. A LinkedIn post. The sales team gets a PDF.
Here's how we'd advise them instead.
The only thing that matters
The only thing that matters in business is finding and maintaining product market fit. Do read Marc Andreessen's essay on this - still the best thing written on the subject.
But most products never even get their shot at PMF. Not because the product is bad (yes, if the product isn't good it won't fly) - but because getting a chance at someone giving your product a chance is only possible if you have steady people coming to your digital shopfront, aka your website - and if they trust you or not.
The queue is the prerequisite of the product. Not its reward.
And trust works one way - building a brand is a consequence, not a pre-requisite, of the implicit trust you have with your audience. One needs to earn the right to be called a brand.
The advisory site inversion
So the advice to Everyday Goods - your website shouldn't be an e-commerce store that has a blog. It should be an advisory site that happens to eventually have a store.
Their 15 years of low-NPS intelligence is the content. The founder or their most experienced product person becomes the face - publicly testing the category, publishing long form honest reviews of the 25 products that don't do what they promise - structured for search and AEO, because buyers ask ChatGPT before Google now. Their support tickets and sales call notes are the raw material - customers have been writing this content for them for years. It's just been sitting unmined.
And the positioning at the end of it - "we spent 15 years distributing these products and watching customers get disappointed - so we built the one we'd actually recommend. Pay for shipping and we'll send it to you."
Trust first. Store second.
The uncomfortable truth - this site should have existed a year before the launch, building traffic and trust for the day the product arrives. This is key. The second best time to start it is this week - product ready or not.
One more thing - launching your own product doesn't mean abandoning shelves. And for a trading company, the elephant in the room - you already have them. If you run a retail outlet, your product gets the best shelf in it from day one. And the shops you've been supplying for 15 years - they're your first stockists, one conversation away. For everyone else - an agent finding shops willing to stock 24-100 units is how you get physical distribution without waiting on a distributor. If the product works - you start getting to a brand.
| Aspect | Traditional Launch | The Advisory Site Playbook |
|---|---|---|
| Website Purpose | E-commerce store with a blog | Advisory site that eventually sells |
| Content Strategy | Press releases and sales PDFs | Honest reviews mining 15 years of support tickets |
| Launch Timing | Website launches with the product | Website launches a year before the product |
| Primary Goal | Sell products immediately | Build trust first, sell second |
Your kids might want this version of the business
And here's an angle almost nobody talks about - succession. SME succession is a real problem. The kids of trading company owners often find the business boring - warehouses, invoices, margins on other people's products. Many would rather do anything else.
But launching your own brand is a different business. Content, positioning, D2C, AI agents - this is the version of the family business a tech savvy kid might actually find interesting. Say Everyday Goods' owner has one - they'd be starting with what every startup founder would kill for. 15 years of supplier and OEM relationships, customer intelligence, distribution know-how - already sitting at the family dinner table.
The advisory site isn't just a GTM play. It can be the succession plan - the next generation building the brand on top of the relationships the first generation built.
And if you are a bootstrapped startup
Same playbook , slightly harder. You don't have 15 years of support tickets - so you generate the intelligence publicly. Test the category yourself, document it honestly, become the person who tried everything. "I was so sick of these after testing 25 of them, got a specialist friend to help build one that works - pay shipping and I'll ship it to you."
The startup builds trust from nothing. The established company activates trust already earned. The established company's version is faster and cheaper - and almost always neglected.
The honest footnote
Someone has to actually build and run this - the site, the content structure, the publishing cadence, the store outreach agent. For most companies that someone doesn't exist, which is why marketing ends up an afterthought - or a side project of an employee already doing another job. It gets the leftover hours and dies quietly, and then the press release wins by default.
If you're doing this, resource it like the launch depends on it - because it does. Either hire a team for it, or a DXE (a trained operator with a team of AI agents underneath) - which is one of the workflows we run for companies we work with, when the gap is GTM. For others it's invoicing, ops, or customer service. The model is the same either way - one human, agents underneath, your workflows run.
Anyways - that's my 2 cents. If you're a trading company and want to explore whether you could do something similar - here's the link to book a discovery call. No strings - if it's not a fit we'll say so and point you somewhere useful.