It's one thing to launch early, simple and test. It's a whole other issue with discovery.<p>Sure, it's easy to launch a webapp as your startup. But how will your first customers or users discover you?<p>A lot has been said about launching early or simple or lean. Not enough however, has been said about earliest discovery. It's sure easy to launch a startup to test when you have thousands of followers already. It's a whole other issue when you don't have any followers (not only on twitter, but everywhere on the internet.. the sum total of your audience)
This is fine if you don't know the market.<p>If you know the market is dying for your product, take your time and build it right the first time. Maybe someone else will get to Techcrunch faster (boohoo), but when they're doing their 3rd rewrite, you'll be sailing towards millions in golden doubloons on your beautifully crafted ship, laughing maniacally all the way.
Why is this advice so damn hard to follow? I guess it's our ego that stops us from launching before we have something that's fully polished. Or worse, our ego that stops us from ever putting something out in the wild just because it isn't perfect. I guess it's best just to follow the advice of Reid Hoffman, "If your not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." It certainly worked for him...<p>If it's our ego that stops us, maybe we just need a little assurance that a failure isn't the end of the world. So, has anyone ever been really burned by putting out something that wasn't ready-for primetime?
Congrats! However, one thing that these type of articles don't report on is when it doesn't work or not quite as plain sailing. The 'success stories' are rare hence why they make better stories. An article I would like to see would be a compare and contrast, 2 similar products using similar 'lean' strategies, one is successful, and one is not. The compare and contrast narrative would be great for learning.
Great article, it is definitely the approach that makes sense for most start ups, people can spend time developing and then not meet the problem they were trying to solve.<p>The tough part is getting users to be a part of that feedback loop, but as others have said it helps you answer that "how do I get users" much quicker.
Lean Launch works for only products that have customers ready to use it.<p>Other cases when your ready to blast 1k emails, your site better be complete or people will visit once and never visit again.
This is an article targeted to get more signups for Mixpanel and CrazyEgg more than anything else. I've seen much much better articles with depth on the same topic.
Be aware that you will burn some customers and lose them. Customer feedback is a scarce resource that you can burn up before converting it to an asset.