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How early is to early ?

Do you have a check for when a product or a service is ready to be advertised ?

I come from a strongly development background and for people like me the product is never good enough, there is always one more thong to optimize, one more thing to add, and so you go in to a death spiral of rewriting and changing that never ends, a lot of maybe good enough projects never saw the light of day because of this.

On the other end there are people that just have a rough idea and a single page website and they start selling.

This is an awesome community and I wanted to ask you all. How do you handle this ?

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    I suffer from this dilemma too! For me, it really depends on the type of product you are building. For e.g., I'm working on a product whose sole proposition is security and privacy, with the target market being the security and privacy conscious crowd. It's going to take more time, but there's no two ways about it. Anything else, I can live with not being close-to-perfect when launching.

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      I am building a remote assistance tool that can run virtualized applications similar to XenApp, MVP was ready few years back but I never felt that the quality of the overall product is good, the streaming was bather then what the other competitors had even now, but I always felt like it can be more. so for the past 3 years it was just sitting there, hopefully it can see the light of day once more with the lattes incarnation 6th or 7th rewrite :D

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        Wow, a few years back is a super long time! If it is better than the current competition, than I would say that it's already more than ready, what's holding you back?

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          I did a tour in Bulgaria where I am from, I talked to the owners if some of the biggest IT businesses, and I am just going to give you a glimpse. So a company selling worldwide with 400 people staff and a support team of 20 people, I go in and ofer them 1/10 of TeamViewer price and they told me they had one of there developers to crack and change the icon of Data in the team viewer exe and they do this 4-5 times a year and provide it on there website as there’s official support tool, how to sell to someone that is making tens of millions and thinks it better to crack support tools by waisting developers time rather then paying 1000 euro per year. I didn't find a way to sell worldwide remotely I was very bad at selling :)

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            You can either open source your work, or find a way to license it to partners. Instead of approaching the big boys, try to identify who in the industry might benefit from using your tech instead of what's already out there. Ideally, you want to be able tell them that using your technology gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.

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    I went through this same problem. The best solution I find is just simpley to answer the question, what is the 1 thing that 1 group of people will pay for, or at the very least, actually use.

    Focus on that, cut out all other crap and features and nice to haves. And wait for the users to give the direction they want.

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      So you think an MVP must be ready before you start talking about it and promoting it ?

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        Not necessarily. I like the approach build the landing page and get the users subbed ready for the MVP roll out. Use that for engagement to make the MVP most viable.

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