When it comes to releasing products, the toughest lesson to learn is to "Go Early, Go Ugly." Most first-time entrepreneurs prefer the opposite because their DNA is to avoid rejection. Their primary focus is to seek validation, from their peers and from their mentors (in time also from their customers). In their mind, rejection is merely an undesirable outcome, which they unfortunately tend to take very personally because they think of it as a failure and a painful reminder to be more prepared the next time around. So they naturally prefer to get their product as perfect as possible. But rejection is NOT a failure. We don’t learn much from positive feedback. We learn a whole lot more from negative feedback. Entrepreneurs who avoid rejection are essentially depriving themselves of important “learning moments”. It's like learning how to sail, you don't start learning until you start to get wet. It seems obvious but for me, it was a tough lesson to learn. Good luck, everyone.
This is a fantastic article. We've had a decent amount of success so far with our startup following this same mantra. Release early with a core set of features, and then follow up with rapid releases (preferably one per feature).
This has the following advantages:
1. Unnecessary features are the #1 source of waste in software. If you launch with a very limited feature set, it's much easier to avoid feature bloat.
2. Having customers immediately helps to fund future development, gives you a large group of real-world test cases, and a huge source of information about what the market wants in your product.
3. Rapid releases let you create constant buzz about your product. If you have six months between releases, it's much more difficult to create constant conversation about what you're up to. Your users will be happier, also, because they continue to feel they're getting more for their money, and they get excited about what comes next. (Also, if you implement their suggestions, they can feel more like they're participating in the product development, which builds a good customer relationship.)
4. Continual releases are a very powerful motivator. We've tried it both ways, and having a release every week (or every other week) for smaller feature sets is much more motivating than spacing them out over a couple months.
(Note: this naturally assumes you've got a SaaS model like us. However, I think you could pull off something similar with desktop software, within reason.)
I think you could pull off something similar with desktop software
You certainly can -- I have done it for years. (I would not assume "rapid releases create buzz". If you're doing it right customers will not even realize they're happening. Launches are a marketing event, not a technical one.)
A word on version management: you can conceptualize the installed base of your software as a series of pools, with a faucet (your website) pouring water into the version of the most recent pool, a few trickles (out of date download sites) pouring into older pools, and some directed flow through your update and purchase pathways. All pools constantly evaporate as customers cease using the software.
The exact size of your pools depends on the specific rate of evaporation and timing between releases, but for most people this heuristic works: "The version most commonly in use is whatever was available from your website two weeks ago. Somebody, somewhere, is still using v1.0 and every other version you have ever produced."
I don't know about for desktop software--if you're gonna do that, you better have a damn good auto-updater. Some desktop software I only use once a week. It's pretty annoying to have to download updates each time I try to run (for instance) NeoOffice.
not sure I agree with this article, sure all those big companies started out small, but it was a whole other market back then.
The game has changed, you now need that huge feature list, you now need that top notch design etc. Why would someone use your product with all the features missing, when they can use another free product that already has those features?
Well, my point is that all the big products have grown to where they are.
Apple launched a phone that couldn't MMS, couldn't have applications on it, couldn't copy and paste.
Even take Mint.com, they started out with just a pie chart and one bank - it was only afterwards they got ever so clever.
If you pick pretty much any big success story and chart the different between them when they got big and where they are now, there are massive differences.
Often a lot of the features only make sense when you're big and popular, and I think many start ups design for them prematurely.
So maybe the point is to find a small enough niche where you have little competition, and build something that fills that tiny niche/solves that core problem very well (and nothing more). And you can expand from there with features, etc. to build a big company?
I don't know, but that makes a lot of sense to me...
You are 100% correct and 100% wrong. Before Mint existed, it felt crazy to try to compete against personal finance software. Intuit Quicken, they had a laundry list of features.
Somehow, someone saw a niche that this gigantic tools failed to address.
The beauty of the startup is that if you focus on the right micro-segment (aka a niche), you can grow very quickly and eventually topple the incumbent Goliaths.
