Jul
19
Based on my own experiences, and what I see happening to some friends companies, I am now fully committed to the “launch early / launch often” strategy (at least w/ regards to Internet related ideas).
Here’s why:
- When your only feedback loop is your board of directors and your employees you will never develop a product that your customer wants. Nor will you ever feel ready to launch.
- If there is a market need for your product, but your product doesn’t quite meet the market’s needs when you launch, you will get their faster by quickly iterating over customer feedback.
- Related to #2, if you spend months or years developing a service, it’s easy to get lazy or burned out. When your customers are demanding a better product, it’s puts the fire under your belly. This may be one of the best reasons to launch early.
- At any given time, someone else is building a product that will be better than your current one. This is why you have to also launch often.
- Revenue. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you’ve raised, launching early gives you maximum run rate to start generating revenue. And often times, launching will start to bring about buzz and inquiries about partnerships which may be revenue-producing. You don’t know about those things until you launch.
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2 Responses to “Memo #9 – Launch early and launch often”
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400% agreed.
Conversely, launch too early and you risk leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of your “what could have been” users.