Rushing to launch can hurt your product
Sharing another interesting resource I discovered: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/how-to-launch-a-product-or-feature-to-maximize-growth
I saw Brian's site shared here yesterday and found lots of interesting insights in there. This one feels vital because so many IHers (including myself) rush to launch a product.
Really good explanation as to why launching too early might put a halt to your growth.
Reading this I'm wondering if there is a sweet spot between this and the 'launch early' mantra. 🤔 My guess is that stripping your product to one core feature and making it works really well before launching it is key.
In very competitive markets a simple MVP just is not enough.
What you describe is the concept of the minimal awesome product (MAP) which focuses on one core feature and does it well.
Otherwise competitors are able to quickly make it better and outrun your idea.
There a quite a few nice articles about MAP, but in my opinion the difference boils down into deciding how competitive the market is.
Still MAP is hard to grasp and you do not really know at what point the product is awesome. This way you might end up with feature creep and never actually releasing.
I still think this just describes an MVP done right. Most founders think they made an MVP, when in fact that's not really an MVP, so there's a constant need to find new terms (minimum viable tests, minimum lovable product, etc.)
What I really liked about this article is that it clearly laid out how launching could impact growth. I'm in that picture and I don't like it. 😳
My hunch is that most founders, including myself, have a 1:1 ratio for talking to users vs building. When that should be more like 9:1.