I learned that there are 3 kinds of products with completely different launch advices.

So I've built a lot of different products, but I noticed that most advice (found on the internet, or told by advisors) apply only to one category of products: the solution. Thing is, not everything can or should be a solution. Here's my interpretation.

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The solution

The solution is a product that answer a specific problem. From my perspective, it's the case of almost every SaaS built. Some examples are Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, Amplitude, Grammarly...

You're most likely building a solution. And the good news is that launch is pretty simple: do it as soon as possible, when your product is somewhat useful and usable. You can even fake part of it and do things manually.

Since you're answering a specific problem, even if it's full of bugs, has a lot of manual steps, you're still solving the problem and people will be happy to use it.

You can then build upon it, polish it, add new features... But what you need to launch is just the core functionality that prove your project solve a pain point. That's all.

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The experience

The experience is a product to be experienced, usually only once. Typically, video games or films, for example. It's a lot harder to find some famous example, since the revenue can hardly be recurring.

Usually, it's a one shot when you release it, so you must make sure that's everything's perfect (or almost). If you miss something, people WILL complain about it and won't give you a second chance.

It's the opposite of the solution, everything should be in its final state when releasing it. That's why video games take years to build, the experience must be awesome from the very beginning to the very end.

Your revenue will occur in the first month of launch, before people forget about it. You can try to polish it and fix bugs afterward, but people will only remember their first experience, as it's not possible to "discover" something twice.

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The toolkit

The toolkit is a product meant to allow users to build things. Just like a tool you provide to fix their problems themselves. Some examples are Photoshop, the Unreal Engine, WordPress, Figma, Bubble...

I'm currently building one of these, and oh boy, you're in for a treat. I found this kind of product the most difficult to build technically speaking. And you can't ship something unfinished or faked.

The whole purpose of this kind of product is to let people be creative with no limit. So there's not ONE core feature, you have to ship a lot of them for it to be really useful: your user should not feel limited.

And it's still a product meant to evolve, so it requires a lot of work before AND after the launch. The advantage of it to be so difficult is that it reduce competition, and you still have a huge market, if you survive long enough.

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What do you think of this? I came to think this after a good amount of people told me to launch my product as soon as possible, but it didn't felt right for my specific case. I'm building a visual scripting platform to create web apps with no code: https://luna-park.app/. It then occurs to me that I'm just not building a solution.