November 12, 2009

The world of entrepreneurship is well-known for being fast-paced.  First movers have an advantage, but so do those who simply build a better product.  Entrepreneurs constantly struggle between taking more time to improve their product for the customer and launching new features out before the competition beats them to the punch.   

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Reid’s words reflect a growing movement within the entrepreneurial community, one that I call the “Iterate Fast and Release Often” philosophy of entrepreneurship.  The core tenet of this philosophy is that it’s more important to launch a product and new features and iterate rather than take the extra time necessary to “perfect” a product or feature before launch. 

The debate on this philosophy has been rising rapidly recently, so I thought it was time to really take a look at the pros and cons of the “Iterate Fast and Release Often” mantra and see just why many entrepreneurs (including me) so highly recommend it.

The perfect product is shaped by the users

Pretend you are the founder of a startup company building a web app (if this isn’t you already). You know that your upstart rival is building a similar product.  However, you don’t know what features it is going to launch with, nor do you know when.  What should you do?

In the Iterate Fast line of thought, the answer is easy: get the thing launched with minimal features.  As long as you have the core basis, you can iterate with new features along the way.  If you are beaten to the market by another company, it can quickly amass market share, attention, and most importantly data.

There is something to be said about making the product right the first time, though.  Launching a very buggy product can lead to a disastrous night of damage control.  But that still is a point in favor of the Iterate Fast camp: the damage can be controlled and bugs can be fixed.  Most of all, users will forgive you as long as the core product is useable.

Here’s the biggest reason I am in favor of the Iterate Fast philosophy, however: the user knows best. You may believe that your research says that this set of 13 features is what users want, but you don’t really know that until the product is launched.  Users interact with web products in surprising ways.  By launching quickly, getting instant feedback from sources such as Twitter, and tracking user behavior on-site, you will have a far clearer direction for your product.  The worst thing you can do is build a feature that nobody wants.  Time needs to be treated as a limited resource.

So this serial entrepreneur recommends that you worry less about launching with everything you want and simply launching and seeing how users behave.  Build new features and products based on how they behave and you will end up with a killer product. 

Finally, don’t worry about the users being upset with your launch: they will forgive you for your errors as long as you are open and transparent about what you are doing.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CMCDerm1

Join the conversation ( 3 )

• Eric Edelstein 1 year 2 months and 3 days ago

  

  We released our Crowdsourcing Social Network “concept” evly.com, a few weeks ago, knowing that it was a VERY EARLY release, and still had problems with the UI/UX and plenty bugs.
  
  But we knew that the longer we waited, the less chance that we would release at all!
  
  We received some good comments when we released, but also some SHOCKING comments, from people that didn’t understand our full vision, and didn’t like seeing bugs in their usage.
  
  Having been through this a number of times in the past, I’m used to this reaction, as I’ve launched software very early on before. However, many of our dev & design team hadn’t, and it’s essential to be able to let them know that the bad comments are expected, especially due to it being such an early release.
  
  Did we make the right decision launching so early? ABSOLUTELY!
  
  In addition to real people building crowdsourcing websites with our wizard and builder, which gives us stats & revenue, we’re seeing what people like and don’t like, and are now moving forward with that in mind.
  
  So I believe that launching early is a good strategy, but try inform your new community that they are “beta testers” or “early adopters” and communicate plenty with your team (especially those who haven’t been involved in an “early launch” before) as there will always be negative comments, no matter how much you try avoid it.
  
  PS: if you take a look at evly.com and want to know our vision for the future, please get in touch with us.
  

• PAUL ROSENFELD 2 years 3 months and 0 days ago

  

  Love Reid's quote. Your post is right-on!
  
  Do you know of Eric Ries' "Lean Start-up" methodology? It's awesome, check it out.
  
  A couple of quick thoughts: I think it's less about "launching fast with minimal features" and more about about "launching with the right "core" as the developer's objective. Nevertheless I agree with the premise to get it out there to learn what customers will pay for. In fact, if i had to do it over, we'd launch with just 20% of what we built for Fanminder Version 1.0.
  
  As it turns out, after we launched we learned of a very large opportunity that only presented itself once we were in the market. So not only do you learn about features, you learn all kinds of things about pricing, billing, potential partner requirements, marketing's needs - that ultimately greatly affect the overall product roadmap.
  
  If anyone reading this wants further information or just wants to chat, please don't hesitate to email me at paul@fanminder.com.

• TJ McCue 2 years 3 months and 4 days ago

  

  hey Ben, I couldn't agree more.
  
  I've been on both sides of this equation. Once, as a startup guy developing an early SaaS play around adventure travel and we kept trying to get some things tweaked, perfected before we went live. But we had to show some of the less-than-perfect pieces to prospects to get them on board. A lot of the tools we have now make it a lot more efficient to iterate quickly.
  
  But, as you point out, it is more the philosophy of doing business and being customer-responsive, market-responsive that makes all the difference in success or failure today. Reid's comment is pretty accurate.
  Thanks for the post.
  TJ
  Sales Rescue Team