How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
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How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
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Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#2This 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.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#3This 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.
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Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#4So 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?
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#5We 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 those users who've paid for our product (when it was barely a product) tell us what they need, it's far more valuable.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#6So 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 I hear "launch early" what I personally take it to mean is "iterate based on _real_ customer feedback", with the intention being you'll minimize wasted work. But this is how you should be running your business all the time - not just at the MVP stage.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#7Strange 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?
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#8So 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?
Of all the excuses I listed, I think fear of failure is the root cause.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#9So 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 think the author nailed it with his "excuse he didn't admit to" paragraph, i.e. it he was afraid it would fail. As long as you haven't actually failed, you can still fantasize about retiring a billionaire in two years time.
It takes a lot of courage to burst your own bubble at the earliest possible opportunity.
Re: How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch
#10The best way I’ve come up with is to think of a startup as an experiment, not as a business.
This is the key take away.
If you're doing an experiment, you're doing it to learn something and prove some hypothesis. The only thing that should delay you from launching is, "If we launch now, we won't be able to collect that data we need to test our hypothesis".
Learn and learn fast. That's it. You can't learn if you're not making contact with your customer. A 25 SLOC splash page that learns something is better than 2500 SLOC that just sit in your GitHub account.