Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

viniciusvacanti.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#21

Post by hkarthik »

funkah wrote: post #7

Strange 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?

At this point, there are a couple of heavily funded daily deals sites that can afford to hire armies of sales people to literally pester their way into multiple local markets. My friends that work at one of these firms say there's about 60 devs supporting 4,000 sales people. My friends that own local restaurants constantly complain about the incessant daily deal sales reps that won't leave them alone to sign up.

These larger firms make their data available to smaller sites via APIs, allowing for firms like Yippit, Sqoot, etc to serve as aggregators. These sites then skim off the top of the deal sales, sometimes getting 50% of the commission on purchased deals.

The danger is that the larger sites that are the life blood of the system run on enormous deficits to maintain those armies of sales reps.

As DHH put it, local deals is like finding oil on the moon: a valuable resource that might ultimately prove too costly to extract.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#22

Post by draz »

alain94040 wrote: post #4

So true. Now, if all entrepreneurs could just stop reading this advice and actually apply it to their projects, that would be amazing. As the article pointed out in the introduction, they knew to launch early. They were told to launch early. And they still didn't. I'm guilty of the same mistake. Why is this cognitive dissonance still haunting all of us?

I am working on a start up in my spare time myself. My partner and I know very well that we need to launch and iterate. For me, there's a fear that if we launch too early, there may be too many issues that will turn users away. When we will finally be "ready" (as much as we could be), those users will not want to come back and try our service. It's all about first impressions. Having said that, I STILL believe in launching early. I interpret it, though, as stripping as many parts of the product as possible and then gradually adding them in

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#23

Post by shawnc »

keeptrying wrote: post #20
shawnc wrote: post #5

We 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?

http://ignitiondeck.com is what i'm talking about specifically.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#24

Post by kenrikm »

jamroom wrote: post #6
alain94040 wrote: post #4

So true. Now, if all entrepreneurs could just stop reading this advice and actually apply it to their projects, that would be amazing. As the article pointed out in the introduction, they knew to launch early. They were told to launch early. And they still didn't. I'm guilty of the same mistake. Why is this cognitive dissonance still haunting all of us?

Maybe if everyone did follow the advice and "launch early" then some of us would realize we really DID launch too early and the popular idea of launching early would lose some of it's appeal? I believe there is a growing number of startups that are realizing the importance of launching with a (fairly) polished product. There's just a ton of startups now, and standing out in the crowd is becoming more difficult. When…

Great advice. Launch early does not mean throw crap at a wall at hope it sticks. You do still need to make something that represents at least some of the function of your initial vision. Really you should make simple version and have a soft launch (not a ton of press) and when you actually "launch" it won't matter that you were out there with a half finished product because no one knew about you anyway. don't code locked in your basement make a demo and then get out there and show it to people and get feedback.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#25

Post by sjayman »

This is an awesome post. Thank you for this. Thinking about a start-up as an experiment, not a business, until it succeeds is the biggest takeaway.

That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April.

None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#26

Post by kenrikm »

draz wrote: post #22
alain94040 wrote: post #4

So true. Now, if all entrepreneurs could just stop reading this advice and actually apply it to their projects, that would be amazing. As the article pointed out in the introduction, they knew to launch early. They were told to launch early. And they still didn't. I'm guilty of the same mistake. Why is this cognitive dissonance still haunting all of us?

I am working on a start up in my spare time myself. My partner and I know very well that we need to launch and iterate. For me, there's a fear that if we launch too early, there may be too many issues that will turn users away. When we will finally be "ready" (as much as we could be), those users will not want to come back and try our service. It's all about first impressions. Having said that, I STILL believe in lau…

How many users will you turn away? Do you think it will be a significant portion of your potential users? To be clear, don't you think it's worth having .05% of your total possible user base turned away so that you can understand what the other 99.95% want?

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#27

Post by Domenic_S »

NameNickHN wrote: post #2

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I've abandoned a project because my non-tech partner constantly came up with new ideas why we couldn't launch and that we needed more features before we launched. This resulted in me being highly demotivated and frustrated.

Not to sound trite, but that sounds like a lack of planning -- in the form of a question, what's your MVP?

If you're clear on that, you point to the doc and say "how does this new idea/feature help accomplish this?" and force a specific answer.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#28

Post by coopdog »

sjayman wrote: post #25

This is an awesome post. Thank you for this. Thinking about a start-up as an experiment, not a business, until it succeeds is the biggest takeaway. That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April. None of those ear…

Just curious, what was it about alpha and beta that don't stick as opposed to now? Have you stuck some users in the mean time?

I also get stuck on the question of how many features is 'enough' that users won't immediately leave, which is when you can begin testing your business assumptions

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#29

Post by keeptrying »

shawnc wrote: post #23
keeptrying wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats your startup?

http://ignitiondeck.com is what i'm talking about specifically.

Thats an awesome idea. So its a $50 flat fee and then the user can do this as many times as they want?

Awesome idea.

Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

#30

Post by john_flintstone »

This is not just a software/startup problem. Every single web project / eCommerce site / anything online that requires work, should be rolling out a variation of an MVP.

I had a meeting with the brother earlier today. He runs an online wholesale business (I do all the tech stuff). I've been leaning towards launching a retail arm in our one EU country, and launching 3 new wholesale websites translated into Dutch, French, and whatever they speak in Belgium.

We decided instead to translate just the landing page 3 times into 3 languages, to set up a retail site landing page, and to run 4 Google ad campaigns for a couple of weeks, dropping a couple of hundred euro on each one - to see what happens... impressions, clicks, etc.

Here's he point. On HN, we hear non-stop about MVPs, and because of the site that's in it, it's all software or web services. But the reality is that everything that points towards an MVP being a good idea for software and web services, is also true for more traditional eCommerce and info sites.

Post reply on HN