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Dec 15 2010

What Are You Waiting For? Launch Already!

I had lunch a couple weeks ago with a friend of mine, and in typical fashion we spent most of the time catching up with our work and family lives. Naturally part of the conversation was spent talking about Max Foundry and how it was going. My friend was particularly interested in how we developed and launched our first product so quickly. You see, he’s been working on a side project for a long time (16 months!) and would like to release it, but hasn’t pulled the trigger yet. My answer to him was simple:

Just get it out there.

launch-button

That’s it. The longer you wait to get your product out the door, the greater the chance that you *never* get your product out the door. The longer you wait, the more you’ll end up goldplating and adding more features that you don’t know are even needed yet.

Each day that you wait to release is a wasted opportunity to start building a customer base and to gather feedback.

In the startup world there is the notion of a Minimum Viable Product [1], which is essentially the minimum amount of features to make your product somewhat attractive to potential customers, and once you reach that point, you launch it. As a startup, to launch a product you must live by the Minimum Viable Product.

I’m sure you’ll have a huge backlog of things you haven’t done yet, and you probably haven’t even thought about half of the things on the Launch Checklist and Questionnaire. That’s OK, you’ll get there. And while you take care of all that “other stuff”, you have a product that people are using and giving you feedback on.

It might take you another month (or two or three) to add a couple more product features and to get through the checklist. That’s fine because you’ve already launched. You might even have paying customers, or maybe your product is in a private beta. Doesn’t matter. What matters is that it’s out there and people are using it.

So stop sitting around at night adding “just one more feature”. Launch the damn thing already!

[1] There’s also the notion of a Minimum Product. The intersection of a Minimum Product and a Viable Product is what makes a Minimum Viable Product. This post has a great graphic about the concept.

[Photo credit: Steven Depolo]

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  • http://twitter.com/timwingfield Tim Wingfield

    Heard a comment at a conference last year: “Stop starting and start finishing.”

    Just sayin’… :)

  • http://arcware.net Dave Donaldson

    I really like that saying. Wish you would have told me sooner because that probably would’ve been the title of this post ;-)

  • http://twitter.com/timwingfield Tim Wingfield

    So Mr. WordPress can’t edit the title of a post? God save Max Foundry… ;)

  • http://arcware.net Dave Donaldson

    Hehe, WordPress can edit the title just fine. But it’s out there now, no sense in changing it.

  • http://arcware.net/minimum-viable-funding/ Minimum Viable Funding | Dave Donaldson

    [...] couple of posts ago in “What Are you Waiting For? Launch Already!” I mentioned the Minimum Viable Product, which is a fancy term for describing a product that has [...]