Sorry if this comes across as a bit harsh but it sounds like you go straight for the low hanging trivial stuff that wastes your precious time before even starting work on the core value proposition.
I'm no founder (never successfully launched anything that has generated financial gain) and have only lurked in the shadows, listened and read what others have tried. Both on the failures and successes.
One thing I've noticed repeatedly is that there can always be a possibility for a product in a crowded market (it will be more difficult for sure) if it solves a niche problem that OTHERS have as well. It is not enough to assume that others know or even have this problem that your product solves. So first step should be to talk to potential customers before working on anything.
By this point you should also know what it is that you are making and why it matters for others (the value proposition). Start working on that first.
- Don't create a landing page for a product you don't have.
- Don't select colors and fonts for days when there is no product.
- Don't do SEO when you have nothing to sell.
Be ready to have it all fail as most startups do, and try to minimize the amount of lost time that goes into these endeavours.
It pains me to see so many startups emailing me who have already spent months or even years building a product without thinking about promotion or validating their idea at all before launching. “Launch first, then figure out marketing” is a recipe for disaster.
This should be repeated again and again, and I think this is a point missed by many enginers. (Disclaimer: I'm an engineer.)
I've seen people spend months (or years) building that perfect website, wait anxiously for the proverbial "launch day," and then be highly discouraged when customers don't magically come. Figuring out who your customers are (and how you are going to get them!) is as important (or even more important) as picking the best framework, optimizing your code, or whatever else we spend time on.
"If you build it, they will come" just doesn't work for startups. Your first 100 users will be won painfully, one at a time.
Think of your first public launch as the start of the development process, not the end. You need to track down people who need what you've built (or need something similar), talk to them in person, listen to their problems and make sure your product solves them.
If you can convince 100 people to try your product and a decent proportion of them turn into daily active users, you're onto something special. If you can't do that, keep iterating or find a new problem to solve.
Couldn't agree with you more. I agree with "release-early-iterate-often" however the notion of "never launch, just iterate" is bad advice IMO. This is also one of the few times I was surprised that more HN readers didn't poke holes in this blog post, but I think that's likely attributed to hacker ego in regard to "marketing" vs "engineering".
A few thousands visitors does NOT mean you're doing things right, in fact it could be reinforcing poor judgement and a bad product. I've seen this happen countless times by founders who didn't know when to stop drinking their own kool-aid and meaningfully evaluate product holes because a handful of visitors swore it was the best thing since slice bread.
You should still wait for having something good enough before presenting it, or people will have bad first experience.
Don't do this. As soon as your product does enough to solve the customer's pain start selling it[1].
If people have a bad experience then talk to them and use that experience to improve the product. If you make changes in isolation without talking to people you may well be making the wrong changes - you don't know what the right changes are without feedback.
If your customers don't have a bad experience, because either you were lucky and built it right to begin with, or because the product is horrible but is less horrible than the problem it solves then you can have paying customers, traction, investors, money, fame, etc! Most of all, you won't run out of money and fail.
Sell as soon as you can. That's usually earlier than you think, and a lot earlier than the time the product is 'ready'.
[1] Unless you're in the sort of market where there's only one customer (eg defence contracting). But if you are then you'll probably have started the sales process before you've even started building the product, because if that one customer doesn't want it there's no point building it.
This is not meant as snark. This is meant for the builders of this product to understand that they are doing this backwards.
The received wisdom in startup land of MVP = launch early, build a landing page and collect emails and all that . . . it is bullshit and abuses the customer base.
Alternate idea -- become a fountain of demonstrated benefits. Tell people about the 10x value they will get if they can live through your costs.
Suggested alternative: blog and blog and blog and blog and video and tell people and talk and talk and talk. The people who sign up to hear you talk about the benefits will be your customers.
The pent-up desire will be palpable. Or the indifference will be palpable. And you will have your market intelligence.
Edit: and with this strategy, you don't even have to build your product. Yet. (But you must be confident that you CAN).
I appreciate your candor. I struggle with some of the same issues, especially when it comes to finding new customers. I imagine a lot of other devs have the same issues.
I recently decided to take a similar approach, which I'm calling "quickie startups". The max timeframe to build a quickie for me is 2 months. It's not so much a desperate shotgun approach as it is just getting ideas out of my head, into reality and seeing which ones have merit. In my head, they're all winners but we all know it doesn't work out that way in reality, as evidenced by a few of your projects (and mine).
I definitely sympathize with your disinterest in a project once it's launched. Building is a fun, creative process. The let down comes when the world is apathetic to your startup and you feel more excitement about the next one, rather than trying to shove something people don't want down their throats.
I agree that you have to give it some time with each one and really try to find your market, but when you are bootstrapping, it's more cost effective to focus on the ones that users gravitate toward.
This is something which I now can't agree with enough. Unfortunately it has taken me two years to get to this point.
It's embarrassing how many times I built products with the sole marketing strategy of "post it to HN and hope it gets 200 votes".
It never felt like that was the strategy at the time. It always felt like I had some better, bigger plan - becoming an active member of some domain forums, writing whitepapers, cold-calling etc. But, had I been honest with myself, it would have been painfully honest that I just didn't know how to reach my customers.
Distribution is the hardest problem startups face these days. Solve that problem first, then write code.
The fact is, that you created a product like other thousends of people, and this is not the biggest face palm for a product launch... everyone is enthusiastic about his product and expect it to have an enormous pitch. But like you a lot of people remain disappointed. Good luck.
Instead, what I think happens is that people learn to launch smaller. A big public launch is, in my view, pretty late to start getting feedback. A fairly polished product is necessary for mainstream users, but if you have something truly valuable you probably can start with something much rougher for people on the early side of the crossing-the-chasm model. Once you have something for the other side of the chasm, you can go after the big public launch.
Agreed entirely about iterating based on real customer feedback, though.
My first startup made that mistake. We built the entire product before getting any customers. Since then, I've always started new projects as pseudo-consulting gigs. That way, the product is designed around a real need.
Great advice. Launch early does not mean throw crap at a wall at hope it sticks. You do still need to make something that represents at least some of the function of your initial vision. Really you should make simple version and have a soft launch (not a ton of press) and when you actually "launch" it won't matter that you were out there with a half finished product because no one knew about you anyway. don't code locked in your basement make a demo and then get out there and show it to people and get feedback.
My (unsolicited) advice that I followed after hearing it from somewhere else (HN probably). Get customers first, build later.
If I don’t already have a line of people ready to put money down for the product (or even pre-ordered), it’s not going to be any easier after I take the time to build it. If I can’t get customers before I build it, I’d seek out different problems to solve.
I am not a serial entrepreneur or someone who has created large businesses like others here, so take what I say with a huge grain of salt, but it’s how I’ve chosen to pursue projects going forward.
I started on this on day 1 - it's quite literally from zero. It's an idea I got quite recently, and haven't done any work on it until starting this experiment. I guess every startup has a day 1 where you can't have spoken to any potential customers yet when you start :-)
But you're totally right, I should have spent day 1 speaking to people, instead of/before even starting building any of the prototype. Already trying to set that lesson into action and starting day 2 by talking to people about the idea!
I'm advocating for understanding your business, not for prematurely building things.
If you're in the extremely rare class of businesses trying to build something on the scale of FB or YouTube where that sort of massive scaling is intrinsic to your mission then yes, you need to start thinking about those problems early.
For everybody else, yeah, absolutely focus on product and getting to 100 or 1000 or 100K or whatever users first.
I am so concerned about all the other work that has to be done that I tend to fall on the other side of the spectrum; get the design to an 'acceptable' place and move on.
My attitude is something along the lines of 'If you're not freaking out, you're not working hard enough'
That said, I still havent launched publically, mostly because of all the 'details' of which you speak (core product works but is ugly).
Yeah, in my personal experience, the biggest problem in very early stage startups has always been figuring out what the right thing to build is, and actually building a version of it that people can use. Customer development and product development. If you build the wrong thing or you never actually get the thing built, any marketing effort is wasted effort.
Nail those things first, then hire someone to do your marketing.
You can still have embarrassingly early releases to smaller audiences, as long as you go about the process of selecting a few of your target customers and explaining to them the purpose of these early releases.
Reach out to two or three of those 50 people who are your target market and bring them inside your product development process.
Show them early builds and solicit their feedback. Make them feel special about being part of an early product release. Listen to them.
You'd be surprised how eager people are to be part of something new, especially if they feel they have input into it, and how forgiving it makes them of a sloppy design or what have you.
you're selling directly to people you find who have the problem that you're solving.
it's exactly that mentality of getting way ahead of yourself before you've even validated and honed your value proposition that I take issue with.
fuck the general public. go solve a real problem for 10 people - it's 1000x more difficult than creating something that looks and feels awesome.
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