Side note: For the past 3 years I’ve been teaching a Startup Bootcamp course to startup founders & operators. I’m teaching it in person (NYC) as monthly series starting next week. Next week’s class is “Startup Bootcamp: Using Goals and Structure to Drive Outcomes” RSVP here.
Launching your product early and quickly is so important to accelerate your early learnings. Every successful founder has started with a great idea, but rarely is the initial idea the one that finds product-market fit. A Founder’s initial idea is just a starting point; twists and turns are guaranteed.
Getting your company/product to launch is not reaching the finish line, but arriving at the starting line.
The long journey of iterating your product or starting over post-launch is what makes the journey so hard. Your work doesn't pay off with immediate reward. So the only way to accelerate the process is by getting to those learnings as soon and as fast as you can.
Here are some of my observations and suggestions from my own experience as well as my work with founders. If you have been thinking about starting something, please read on to understand why you should get up and do it right now. And if you know someone who has been talking about their startup but hasn’t gotten anywhere - send this to them!
4 (Bad) Reasons You Haven’t Started Yet
1- You feel like your product isn’t ready
You know the problem you want to solve or the space you want to build in. You’re just not sure how it’s going to work exactly. You are stuck on the business model or the brand or the mechanics or whether to start no-code or which platform to use, and you want to do more research. Meanwhile, months are ticking by.
The thing is, you can spend an eternity talking about an idea or product, but everything is speculation until it is actually live. You don’t have any data so all your decisions are theoretical.
In the meantime, you can end up with your own worst echo chamber around the great product you’re building and how much people need it. All your friends and family enthusiastically cheer you on with phrases like “that make sense” or “I need that!” As you talk to former co-workers and industry contacts, they give you positive affirmation you’re on the right track. Feels good, right?
But the reality is that you have… nothing. It’s all just a theoretical exercise until you build something, bring it into the world and start getting real, measurable feedback from people actually using or paying for your product. That survey you sent out and the friendly support you get is meaningless. The only real feedback comes from user behavior in action.
2- You want to protect your precious idea
Often, founders want to delay launch because they believe their uniquely great idea will be stolen. They want to build as much as possible to have a large lead before being public. The reality is that for any great idea, there’s an equally smart person with a similar set of experiences that has likely had a similar idea. To make progress from idea to scale requires execution and iteration - not the core idea itself. Initial ideas are rarely the core of a long-term business strategy; they’re just a starting point.
While you’re protecting your idea, someone has iterated multiple times on a similar product idea and advanced their learnings by 5 generations. These are learnings you have yet to embark on as you privately try to “perfect” your idea. That just puts you behind others.
3- You’re afraid you might be wrong
The reality: you probably are wrong about a lot of things. You’re probably also right about some things. But you won’t know which are which until you’re out there. You’ve made assumptions based on your observations and experiences, but you can’t know everything, and all the variables are constantly changing. User behavior is changing with time, economic conditions change what people are willing to pay for, generational shifts are changing your user base, etc. What worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the present. The only way to start testing those assumptions is for customers to tell you with their actions and wallets that you’re on the right track.
Even the most successful founders and leaders are often wrong - so why wouldn’t you be? Better to just assume you’re likely to be wrong - then come up with a plan to learn what you’re wrong about and change it up. I found this is the easiest way to reduce your loyalty to ideas (and your own ego). Assume you’re wrong, and focus on the process of learning and iterating.
4- You’re afraid to get real feedback
You’re in a warm, comfy place when you’re hiding between the excitement of doing something new and actually putting it out there. Founders spend way to much time in that cozy place because you can never be disappointed when there is no negative feedback coming your way. Things are going “great” when you’re still building, but once you’re live with zero to few customers - now the answer to “how’s it going” has a concrete answer: “not so good.” You are afraid of failure. But failure is the expected outcome when you first launch something - its not going be great. The real answer to that question post-launch should always be “We’re learning, and that is a great sign.” (There are exceptions… I’ll keep telling my in-laws “it’s going great,” cause that is easier than explaining the agile product development philosophy to them.)
How to get moving
Get out of stealth
Do you have “stealth startup” or “working on something new” on your LinkedIn? Just change it to something concrete describing either the product you’re building or sector you’re working on. You don’t need to make a big announcement and can change all of this later. You can also call it a side project or hobby, but write something. Being public gives you:
A concrete foundation for you to have conversations with customers, partners, investors. It makes a big difference for people to engage you when they know what you’re working on.
An audience before your product is launched. It’s too late to start talking about what you’re building if you start at launch time- just start gathering an audience now.
A commitment and accountability once you’ve announced it to the world. Don’t give yourself room to walk it back.
If it doesn’t work out, who cares - just rewrite history and change your story, or share all the lessons you learned. Nobody is paying enough attention or cares, just rebrand your direction.
Launch something, choose your signals wisely
Launch something, anything - that helps you get your product into the hands of your target customer. This could be an early version of your product, a sign-up webpage, a mechanical turk MVP or a small part of your final vision - but its a way to start getting signals from your customers.
Seek out your signals wisely. Are people using your product because they love it, or because they are your friends doing you a favor? Are they using it because it’s free or do they really see value? Does the perception of the value of the product match the reality?
At this stage you often want your original hypothesis to be right so badly, you’ll seek out validation from all the signals. Try to be objective as you assess how things are really going.
Don’t celebrate “being right” about your product hypothesis
As you start learning, it feels good to have some of your product hypotheses validated. I would caution you and your team from overly celebrating when this happens - it can lead to incentivizing trying to validate your ideas vs. testing ideas in a way that is scientifically objective and agnostic as to the result. The truth is it is very difficult to know which ideas will work and not work in the real world, so celebrating ideas that worked is tantamount to celebrating the correct heads-or-tails call. What should be celebrated is the process of having a hypothesis, a strong process for testing it and iterating quickly.
Please, learn from my mistakes
It’s very easy to fall into a lot of the traps above - everyone’s done it, including me. It can be very uncomfortable to put something out into the world when it’s not fully formed - especially if you are an overachiever always going for the As. We even made this mistake *again* when launching Lynx Collective - as soon as we did, we were kicking ourselves for not getting it out there sooner. It was immediately obvious that we lost valuable time.
So learn from us. Don’t wait. Launch. Now!
UPCOMING PROGRAMMING
Startup Founders and Operators Pizza Lunch (NYC, Feb 6, 12pm ET)
This is another opportunity to connect with about a dozen other startup people based in NYC in a casual setting. Join us for pizza lunch with other NYC startup founders and operators. (Open to the public)
Startup Bootcamp: Using Goals and Structure to Drive Outcomes (NYC, Feb 6, 3:30pm ET)
Open to anyone who wants to learn how to grow a startup organization - founders, operators, execs & employees. The material we cover is generally designed for startups that are in growth mode, however, it may be valuable for anyone interested in scaling organizations. (For those who can’t make it live in person, this session will be recorded and/or livestreamed.)
Startup Founders and Operators Dinner (NYC, Feb 13, 6pm ET)
Join us for dinner with other NYC startup founders and operators. This is an opportunity to get to meet about a dozen other startup people based in NYC in a casual setting (Open to the public).
Ask a VC: Heidi Roizen, Threshold Ventures (Virtual, Feb 22, 4pm ET)
Heidi is a VC, corporate director and self-described ‘recovering’ entrepreneur. She is a Partner at Threshold Ventures as well corporate director for Planet PBC (NYSE:PL), Upside Foods and Polarr.
She also leads Stanford’s Threshold Venture Fellows Program in the Management Science and Engineering department and serves on the Advisory Councils for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Stanford Technology Ventures.