Just launch already.
Failure to launch seems to be a disease in the startup community.
Everyone is working on a ton of projects, everyone is plugging away…but noone is launching. Everyone is waiting for perfection.
WHY?!
Do you honestly believe that if you don’t release a perfect product right away, noone will care? Here is a dirty little secret…noone will care even if you do release a perfect product.
Do you believe if you don’t release a perfect product right away, that people are going to hate? Here is another dirty little secret, they’ll hate even if you launch a perfect product.
So just do it already.
There are so many advantages:
- You start aging that domain 6 months early. This leads to more Google traffic earlier, since the big G tends to give bonus points for older sites.
- You build features people want, instead of wasting time building features you think they want. You may think it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but in reality that feature, that you spent 2 weeks coding, will only be useful to 2 people.
- You don’t waste your time on useless things.
- Scaling - why waste time optimizing for a ton of traffic when you are getting 10 hits a day? Trust me, even if you hit traffic issues, you aren’t going to lose many users, they’ll just come back the next day.
- Security - why waste time coding security features? Noone is going to hack a site that gets 10 hits a day. A good example here, is antileet on HN. He wrote an app like Omegle, then started fixing security holes and doing spam protection….a week later Omegle launched and took his cake. If he didn’t bother wasting time on security and spam protection, he might have been in Omegle’s shoes right now.
- Design - no matter how nice design you make…that first one will be shit compared to your other ones. So why exactly are you spending months designing something, which will not even exist 3 months later?
- You start growing your community right away. Early community building is the hardest part…so why not get a 3-4 month head start?
- There are no more excuses. We’ve all been there, “oh we gotta finish this feature”, “oh we gotta wait till May…since statistically startups that launch in May have a bigger chance of succeeding”, “oh I gotta go save up a little bit more, so that I’ll have $$$ to pay for the 5 million users we are going to get in the first week”. No, you’ve launched, and now it’s time to get your hands dirty.
- You actually see if you are doing something productive, or if you are wasting your time.
Now, I’m not saying you do the whole press thing at this stage. No…what I’m saying is you gotta put your stuff out there, to see what the actual users think. Call it an open alpha…where you build up the product in front of a live audience.
I know you stick to programming since it’s what you are comfortable with. You are scared of marketing, you are scared of building a community, you are scared of putting yourself out there. But you gotta be willing to step out of your shell, if you want to be successful. Stuff like that only looks scary from a distance, once you go get your feet wet, it’ll only be a matter of days before you get comfortable doing these things.
So just launch already…even if you lose 90% of users who come to your site during the build process…that’s still 10% left over to help you create a product that people actually want.
