How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by apenwarr » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 12:04 AM UTC

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…

These early launches are not expected to "stick" - either that, or I've just been terribly unlucky. The only value you need to extract is real-time feedback about what you got right and what you got wrong. Then you tweak it and launch again, and again, and again. And eventually, you reach "product-market fit." And then it sticks. If you're lucky.

But the early product is not expected to be scalable. It just helps you avoid the problem of launching a late product with all the same major flaws.

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

#42

Post by wulczer » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 2:52 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #36

NameNickHN wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[...] those tasks were never common/important/etc enough to justify even an hour writing up a tool to automate them. I can't agree more. It took me a while to get there but in the end it's exactly what everybody should do. As of right now I'm manually creating the accounts of new customers (has something to do with creating new database tables which is done half-automatically). Right now there is only a trickle of ne…

A major "aha!" moment for me was 37Signals writing "If you have a 30 day trial anyhow, launching with billing code written means you've swapped something customers actually will notice today for something they won't." I don't endorse that specific advice (because you should probably auth cards on launch day) but the kinda relentless scope-cutting it implies has been a major win for me.

We launched with billing code, but did not have code to actually do something with accounts that did not pay until they were into their 35th day of a 30 day trial (a slight estimation error, you know how software development works).

"Hey, you lucky guys, we're extending your trial period by five days! Ain't that cool?"

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

#43

Post by draz » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 3:01 AM UTC

kenrikm wrote: post #26

draz wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

well, it's a tough one... Intellectually, I agree with you, but it's sort of a gut feeling. The issue is that as a start-up you are limited in resources. So how many campaigns can we run? How many friends can we nag to use our service time and time again? etc. You don't want to exhaust your resources at the beginning. Of course we will launch and iterate, but this is just a fear. Is it rational? Maybe not. I hope not :-)

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

#44

Post by creamyhorror » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 3:32 AM UTC

hkarthik wrote: post #21

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. Thes…

That's quite interesting. I'm in a non-US market where deals have traditionally tended to be not that attractive, perhaps because of product import costs and perhaps because of a captive-market situation, and I'm wondering if the pestering-salesperson approach is the right one to induce more businesses to open up to the possibility of offering good deals.

We have group-buying (Groupon-style) deals, which has opened up the way somewhat, but I'm playing around with a more traditional deal-listing model that doesn't push merchants as hard. Do you think salespeople is the only way to keep merchants offering deals, for a listing model? It seems costly but also the only way to keep merchants listing deals even when the revenue outcomes of previous outings haven't been that spectacular.

I appreciate any thoughts you or anyone else might have on the issue - thanks!

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

#45

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 4:26 AM UTC

alexkearns wrote: post #15

I 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…

Burnout?

It's reasonable to want to be in good shape when you put something out there. If you can't be responsive to users, you'll lose 'em.

My tip: go someplace quiet, warm, and pleasant for a couple of weeks. Read novels. Sleep late. Have a beer on the beach early in the afternoon. Go for long walks and maybe some long runs. Your love for what you do will return after a while.

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

#46

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

Instead, what I think happens is that people learn to launch smaller. A big public launch is, in my view, pretty late to start getting feedback. A fairly polished product is necessary for mainstream users, but if you have something truly valuable you probably can start with something much rougher for people on the early side of the crossing-the-chasm model. Once you have something for the other side of the chasm, you can go after the big public launch.

Agreed entirely about iterating based on real customer feedback, though.

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

#47

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 4:32 AM UTC

draz wrote: post #43

kenrikm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

well, it's a tough one... Intellectually, I agree with you, but it's sort of a gut feeling. The issue is that as a start-up you are limited in resources. So how many campaigns can we run? How many friends can we nag to use our service time and time again? etc. You don't want to exhaust your resources at the beginning. Of course we will launch and iterate, but this is just a fear. Is it rational? Maybe not. I hope not…

LinkedIn's founder Reid Hoffman once said: "If you are not embarrassed by your first release, you've launched too late!"

If you want to try stuff out early, also consider in-person guerrilla user testing, running ad-driven tests on a fake brand, buying low-cost traffic, and asking fellow entrepreneurs to try things out. For more on this, the Lean Startup Circle mailing list has a lot of good ideas.

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

#48

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 4:35 AM UTC

GBKS wrote: post #11

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.

I'm sure this sounds crazy to some, but I wanted to add we do something similar.

Every commit goes live as soon as the tests pass. We do have a staging server, but it's running the same code as in production. We use it for manual putzing around (so we don't mess up production data or clutter production logs), and we eventually added feature toggles so that a feature can appear only on staging.

That means we're releasing every few hours, which a) means we get feedback as soon as possible, and b) production bugs are pretty easy to run down, because you know just where to look.

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

#49

Post by wpietri » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 4:37 AM UTC

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…

Bravo! Why do you care about "final"? I can't imagine you'll stop iterating in response to customer feedback, so isn't "final" an illusion?

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

#50

Post by lusr » Tue, Apr 03, 2012, 5:25 AM UTC

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…

Thanks for this. Reading all this stuff about people releasing stuff after 2 nights of work I was starting to wonder if I was crazy having my closed beta planned after 3 months development. I've been working damn hard part-time on the core technology of my project. Time adds up slowly when you're working part-time, and surely sometimes a new idea really does require a fair bit of work before it's ready for customer feedback?

Then I saw your comment about iterating on real customer feedback and I realised there's no difference between "releasing early" and "release a beta [early and get feedback early]", and obviously the time to release a beta varies depending on the product. If you think about Google or Shazaam or any technology-based service, the core algorithms took time to develop to a point where a beta made sense because access to the technology was the product. Or am I missing something?)