How We Fooled Ourselves Into Waiting Too Long To Launch

There exist many, many businesses where V1.0 of the product can be the CEO scrambling with a cell phone, Gmail, and a spreadsheet. This is especially true for business process innovation type businesses like e.g. ZeroCater (which actually started out pretty much exactly like that). After you learn exactly where the painful bits are you can code to prevent them rather than coding for problems which may not ever be experienced by any human ever.<p>To this day, there's a couple of things where my workflow is "SSH into the box and run commands against the Rails console" because those tasks were never common/important/etc enough to justify even an hour writing up a tool to automate them.

<i>The best way I’ve come up with is to think of a startup as an experiment, not as a business.</i><p>This is the key take away.<p>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".<p>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.

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 just can't seem to launch it. It is not that I am constantly tinkering with it. I haven't touched it since it was completed a couple of months back. It's ready to be launched at a moment's notice. I even posted about it on Hacker news to get pre-launch feedback. But, for reasons I am not 100% sure of, I just can't conjure up the energy to write a few press releases and send them out to some blogs and publications.<p>I am not sure exactly why this is. Am I fearful of it being a failure or am I fearful of all the work I'll have to do when users start giving feedback. Perhaps it is not so much launch fear as launch fatigue.

We launched a "netflix for action sports" dvds back in 2004 and the first day we shipped all the dvds (about 30) by hand. We hand picked from inventory what each customer wanted and then made mailing labels on the laser printer, licked the envelopes and mailed them out. Once we found out that there was a rental market for action sports DVD's we built the back end to use bar coding of dvds, automated envelope printing, etc. We did build the credit card gateway upfront though, both because we were offering free 30 day trials that involved shipping customers our inventory and also because we wanted to capture the CC info for recurring billing upfront.

So true. Now, if all entrepreneurs could just <i>stop</i> reading this advice and actually <i>apply</i> 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?

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.<p>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.<p>None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.

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 those users who've paid for our product (when it was barely a product) tell us what they need, it's far more valuable.

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.

This 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.

I launched early with a paid copy of our product, and people complained about it a lot. This was good since I knew what to improve.<p>The best way to make people care about a product is get them to pay some money for it first.<p>I also launched a free version of our product after. While this one has a lot more users and is growing exponentially, the feedback is far sparser. People care for things they pay for and that attention is great for shaping the beginning of your startup.

Great article. Launching fast is always a good thing for any startup. The challenge with our startup, PayGuard, is that we are a payments processing service. Building the site is not the issue, the integration with financial institutions are. We were able to build the Alpha version of the product with all the key basic functionalities in 6 weeks but we could not test it yet to actually transfer money. We began testing the key features using dummy data.

This is not just a software/startup problem. Every single web project / eCommerce site / anything online that requires work, should be rolling out a variation of an MVP.<p>I had a meeting with the brother earlier today. He runs an online wholesale business (I do all the tech stuff). I've been leaning towards launching a retail arm in our one EU country, and launching 3 new wholesale websites translated into Dutch, French, and whatever they speak in Belgium.<p>We decided instead to translate just the landing page 3 times into 3 languages, to set up a retail site landing page, and to run 4 Google ad campaigns for a couple of weeks, dropping a couple of hundred euro on each one - to see what happens... impressions, clicks, etc.<p>Here's he point. On HN, we hear non-stop about MVPs, and because of the site that's in it, it's all software or web services. But the reality is that everything that points towards an MVP being a good idea for software and web services, is also true for more traditional eCommerce and info sites.

It's important to draw a line in the sand where you will launch, say, "when I get X done, we will launch". Then make sure you stick to it. If you plan well, and you know your customers, this should work.<p>It seems like the real problem here is just not knowing your customers. By all means you should be beta testing with your friends and anyone else you can guilt into helping you. Don't launch blind.

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?