When to launch your product
Pause for a moment and visualize your product launch day.
Yes, that moment you’ve been building towards. The scariest day of your founder journey. The day you finally launch your product into the world for real users to use.
That day you’ve worked so hard to reach…
You’ll be releasing the worst version of your tech that you’ll ever produce.
Come again?
This isn’t our way of saying your tech sucks, this is our way of saying, your tech will only get better from here.
Software development is an ongoing process
Technology is an ongoing process. The moment you release your product to real users is the moment you begin collecting feedback from those users about:
And that ?????is often the hardest pill for founders to swallow, because it is hard to bring others into your creative process. The way you perfectly designed that one thing… might actually be completely contrary to the way your users would use it. Users will have opinions and will change the course of your plans. But that is precisely the kind of change you want to incorporate. In fact,
The sooner you can get people to ???on your idea, the better.
Feedback makes your product better
You build your app so people will use it, right? User feedback lets you know what those very users want to be able to do (kind of a product-market fit magic trick, if you ask us ??). So the sooner you start hearing from users about what they like and don’t like about your product, the sooner you can iterate and build a better product.
So if we know (1) Your tech is the worst it’ll ever be the first day you launch it (no matter how long it takes you to launch it) AND (2) the sooner you can get people to ???on your idea, the better… When should you launch your product?
As soon as possible.
Launch your product as soon as possible
Once you have something for users to test, get it in their hands and start getting feedback. Then do something with that feedback. Launch an update the next week. And carry on like this, incorporating positive changes week over week and month over month.
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There is a real fear in launching. We’ve seen it. We’ve felt it. And we’re calling it out so that we can remove fear of feedback from our dev practices.
Don’t fear user feedback. Chase it.
Don’t gate keep from real users. Usher them in.
Plenty founders agree
We recently published a white paper that consolidated feedback from founders who have built tech products and one consistent theme was if they could do it all again, they would have launched sooner with less.
If I could go back, I would do this differently... I would simplify what I built as an MVP, even more. I would make it do one function and then I would build an additional function and then an additional one. The investment in time to figure out the product strategy and how that contributes to revenue is the only thing you should be focusing on when building an MVP in my opinion. - Lisa Bubes , Founder of Garmentier
You spend a year building “the greatest thing,” and we would have been so much better off just building a small MVP and pushing it out there. - Logan Weaver , Founder & CEO at Surmount AI
You might have set out with this one problem and then, like we have, you get in there and realize, oh, actually, they want this instead. - Jillian Lee Stout , COO, CPO & Co-Founder at Mindful Mamas
Make the time between “idea phase” and “test phase” as short as possible. Switch into execution mode to see what you don’t know as quickly as possible. - Noah Loudon Noah Loudon, Co-founder and COO at Budi
The MVP is a Minimum Viable Product, it is not the Most Valuable Product. That's where most of the mistakes happen. Especially early in startups, you want to push all the features possible into your MVP, but you still have to validate them. Some of them are not even used by users. Or it will be something that they thought that was cool, but in reality, the data supports that they barely use it. You could have spent another 100k and X number of months and then in the end, nobody's using it or it's not a feature that will be a deal breaker. - Carlos Felipe Gaitan Ospina , Co-Founder, CEO of Benchmark Labs Inc.
Build better products
As you incorporate feedback cycles into your product development, you will build a better than you could have dreamt.
?????Launch as soon as possible.
?????Listen to your users.
?????Incorporate their feedback.
?????Build better products.
If you are ready for a technical partner who will teach you to become a confident tech leader who understands your customers and builds better solutions, it may be time for us to meet. Contact us and we’ll schedule a call to see how we can help.