I attended Steve Blank’s talk last week and it really hit home for me, so I thought I’d share it with all of you.
When you launch your product, you really have no idea if it’s going to work, so don’t pretend like you do. Instead, first product launch is your opportunity to validate your vision by finding early adopters who are willing to use your buggy product that is lacking features and work closely with them to develop a mainstream product. Ideally, you’ve been doing that from the beginning (before you have working code, even) but definitely before you try to target the mainstream market.
Therefore, until you’ve gotten early adopters to pay for your product (or in some other way invest resources), you have no idea if what you’ve built is ready to be sold and marketed. So until you do, do not:
- Hire sales people
- Hire a PR firm
- Hire marketing people
- Buy expensive advertising
- Land interviews with major publications and news outlets
You are wasting your time, money, and opportunity (the NYTimes is only going to write about you once) on a product that hasn’t been market tested. You don’t know if the value proposition resonates with people enough that they will pay for it. Most likely, it doesn’t, so you’ll be blowing your precious cash trying to get people to buy something they don’t want.
This was a big eye-opening moment for me. I’ll get to the specific lessons-learned with regards to Postling in a later post.
