My approach to avoid this is to not have a development or staging server. Just a live site. That's what I work on at the beginning. It's always out there, so there are no excuses. And it keeps your focus on the user experience.
How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#12Strange that there is still so much daily-deal stuff being worked on. Is this really fertile ground for a business? (Honest question.) Is everyone still reacting to the Groupon IPO, even though that business has all sorts of smells?
The daily deal business can make a lot of money and consumers (particularly women) love it.
However as Groupon has proven they are typically very dependent on expensive marketing channels in order to achieve growth. Over the last year or so the market has become really saturated with daily deals sites and so the competition for customers is fierce. I think as Groupon's woes become increasingly apparent, the daily deals bubble will start to implode (if it hasn't begun to already)...
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#13Strange that there is still so much daily-deal stuff being worked on. Is this really fertile ground for a business? (Honest question.) Is everyone still reacting to the Groupon IPO, even though that business has all sorts of smells?
The only (real) barrier to entry to daily-deal sites is sales. Set up Magento and you now have a daily deal site.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#14Strange that there is still so much daily-deal stuff being worked on. Is this really fertile ground for a business? (Honest question.) Is everyone still reacting to the Groupon IPO, even though that business has all sorts of smells?
The only (real) barrier to entry to daily-deal sites is sales. Set up Magento and you now have a daily deal site.
Well, I guess that is pretty much what I'm thinking. The barrier to entry is low, but that just means the barrier to having your userbase taken by Groupon or LivingSocial is equally low.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#15I never thought that I would be hit by launch fear. Over the past couple of years, I have conceived and finished a number of reasonably big projects - www.gambolio.com, www.musicgames.co, www.casualgirlgamer.com and www.tiki-toki.com - and for each I launched as soon as I thought the software/site was polished enough. I had no hesitation or doubt. But for some reason, with my latest project - www.peopleplotr.com - I just can't seem to launch it. It is not that I am constantly tinkering with it. I haven't touched it since it was completed a couple of months back. It's ready to be launched at a moment's notice. I even posted about it on Hacker news to get pre-launch feedback. But, for reasons I am not 100% sure of, I just can't conjure up the energy to write a few press releases and send them out to some blogs and publications.
I am not sure exactly why this is. Am I fearful of it being a failure or am I fearful of all the work I'll have to do when users start giving feedback. Perhaps it is not so much launch fear as launch fatigue.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#16Great article. Launching fast is always a good thing for any startup. The challenge with our startup, PayGuard, is that we are a payments processing service. Building the site is not the issue, the integration with financial institutions are. We were able to build the Alpha version of the product with all the key basic functionalities in 6 weeks but we could not test it yet to actually transfer money. We began testing the key features using dummy data.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#17I never thought that I would be hit by launch fear. Over the past couple of years, I have conceived and finished a number of reasonably big projects - www.gambolio.com, www.musicgames.co, www.casualgirlgamer.com and www.tiki-toki.com - and for each I launched as soon as I thought the software/site was polished enough. I had no hesitation or doubt. But for some reason, with my latest project - www.peopleplotr.com - I…
Stop thinking and launch. There has been enough thinking on this project already it seems!
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#18I launched early with a paid copy of our product, and people complained about it a lot. This was good since I knew what to improve.
The best way to make people care about a product is get them to pay some money for it first.
I also launched a free version of our product after. While this one has a lot more users and is growing exponentially, the feedback is far sparser. People care for things they pay for and that attention is great for shaping the beginning of your startup.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#19There exist many, many businesses where V1.0 of the product can be the CEO scrambling with a cell phone, Gmail, and a spreadsheet. This is especially true for business process innovation type businesses like e.g. ZeroCater (which actually started out pretty much exactly like that). After you learn exactly where the painful bits are you can code to prevent them rather than coding for problems which may not ever be experienced by any human ever.
To this day, there's a couple of things where my workflow is "SSH into the box and run commands against the Rails console" because those tasks were never common/important/etc enough to justify even an hour writing up a tool to automate them.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#20We launched early, asked for money right away, and have been doing excellent ever since. Now our problem is defining what makes a 'final, out of beta, stable' version. Defining it, and then meeting it. We're constantly going 'this isn't good enough for a final release'. But hey, almost 300 paying users right now is motivation to make it better for THEM, and not for us and our imaginations of what is better. With thos…
Whats your startup?