How long did it take you to launch your product? I'm 27 days in and 50% there.
I'm working on a new product and while I'm ready to offer the basic version of the product in next couple of days, launching the full version of the product will take another 15-20 days. I personally feel this is awfully long to launch a product.
How much time did you take to launch your product? When did you get your first customer? When did you achieve $1k in MRR? What other important milestones did you reach in the first 6 months?
I built, launched and got revenue within about 48 hours! But I'm in a unique position where the company I'm building is to help people to build rapidly, without code!
I already had 1k emails I could use and a decent Twitter following.
That is amazing fast! Can you share any insights about how you built those 1k emails and Twitter followers to launch to?
Thanks!
Jonathan
I actually did a little challenge of building 10 mvps in 24 hours about a year ago haha.
I wrote https://medium.com/startup-grind/the-non-technical-guide-to-launching-products-side-projects-1c5a9562fdb3 on Medium and worked for Product hunt for two years. So that helped!
I'm teaching others how to do this at https://www.newco.app/
I took over a year to launch my product. On the technical side of things, it was beyond my skill level when I started.
On the design end, StripTogether.co went through endless revisions before I was happy to share with the public. The drawing interface specifically has seen over 50 revisions.
I know that most will tell you to act quickly, and there's absolutely value in that advice, but at the same time I think that too many people get caught up with the idea of "MVP" and in turn release products that users can't fall in love with. For my project, it was important to me that the product be something that creates a real emotional response and connection with the user, and getting that right takes time.
I'm betting on the long game though, a year after launch there's no revenue (fixing that next month..) but there is value in the content that will only grow.
This is such good advice that gets overlooked. Building a product that evokes an emotional response is incredibly hard and takes LOTS of thinking and learning and trying (and flailing around).
Can you share any insights when you realized the emotional response and connection you were looking for was taking hold in your product?
Thanks Jonathan, I truly believe that creating an "evocative product" is one of the most fundamental attributes to success. (Not that we're there yet :P )
Quite honestly, the emotional response was there at launch, although it has grown stronger along with the community and art quality.
I reached out to users (Strippers) individually yesterday to get feedback... and I was blown away by the testimonials I received. To think, I never would have heard if I hadn't just asked.
The thing is, StripTogether solves the problem of the isolating nature of art practice, but experiencing that problem myself is not how I came to the solution. (although I know the woes of drawing alone far too well!)
StripTogether was conceived not from the question, "How can I make drawing less lonely?". Instead, it was conceived from the question, "How can I make a product that will evoke an emotional response?". Creating the response is the primary goal of the product, not an afterthought. I was not looking to create an art platform from the outset. I was looking to create something that would foster connection and surprise.
So if you ask me, I'd find a new project to build by starting with the question, "What response do I want to evoke?".
That is exactly what I hoped to hear. It's awesome to see that you are so in tune with the need to create an emotional response.
I heard somewhere that:
Sounds like you subscribe to this school of thought as well!
Agreed! I like that breakdown :)
I started figuring out mine in november 2016 when I started making calls and cold emailing prospective customers. I’ve had a few false starts, pauses, and juggling a full time job at the same time. However getting to an “MLP” (minimum lovable product) is important and I’ve learned from running alpha versions in production with a few customers and learning what’s important to them. I hope to get my beta out the door and onboard a few more before this fall.
It’s a journey for sure!
I also did a three-week iPhone app MVP that I released a few weeks prior to starting this one and it’s still making a tiny trickle of passive income. I don’t care much about that app tho and the problem it solves. I do care about this one... which is why I’m OK with it taking time.
I've drowned over 5 years on https://www.datagekko.com so far. Though it is on and off (on average I spend at least an hour a day) and has been a passion project of mine. A lot of the initial time was spent just learning, testing, prototyping and then rinse and repeat. Effectively its been maybe 6 months to a year worth of full time work but didn't have that luxury as this was a side project of mine.
I've been investing quite a bit more time recently as I'm ramping up for launch.
On a separate note - it's been a fun journey, especially with tech evolving at a breakneck pace. The project wouldn't really be feasible to just bootstrap back then and would also be fairly hard on the technical level since it's a very engineering heavy project.
I've had a very similar journey! Though I don't like to admit that my first prototype was five years ago, there can be benefit to taking your time on/off.
By the way, the design of your landing is quite nice :)
Yeah time flies. Also thanks for the feedback!
Since I've nailed the backend architecture and everything is flowing I've been trying to reduce feature creep early on so I've restrained myself to a very barebones feature set that allows me to launch as an MVP and then build out from there. There's so much things to make and so little time. This way I can maybe justify spending a lot more time on it :)
Hey @jackofall,
I believe it depends on the kind of product you're building. Ryan Hoover built an MVP for Product Hunt in 20 minutes (http://ryanhoover.me/post/69599262875/product-hunt-began-as-an-email-list).
I built a basic version of earlystagenews.com in 3 days (1.5 hours for the website and the rest to source the first set of milestones)
(Edit: I know the comparison is not totally justified but what I'm trying to put forth is that getting validation for the idea is equally important and it depends on the maker at what stage of the product-building process he/she seeks validation)
Assuming you're building a software product, I think the time that you've put in is reasonable. If you think you can validate your idea with whatever basic features you have available at the moment, go ahead and launch it 🙆 You will receive feedback which will help you figure out what to do next. Good luck and do keep us posted :) 👍
Tip: Create a 'Show IH' post and launch whatever you've built. This community is super helpful and I'm pretty sure you'll benefit ☺
Hi @jackofall
Have you considered to launch landing page with option to subscribe for early access? You can quickly measure interest of your target audience and decide if you want to invest time to your product. We did it for https://owwly.com/ - we checking now how people react on our tool and gathering valuable feedback.
Several of my products are going on 3+ years and haven't been released, while the fasted I've ever gotten a project out was over a weekend. Took about 3 months before I had a MVP complete with SaaS.
While I've got no money to market, the products I have released have brought me in some money to keep the incentive going.
I'm on day 59, but that is spread over almost a year - https://twitter.com/JoshDance/status/1011850070952558592
This comment was deleted 6 years ago