When is it the right time to launch my product?

Sup Op Sandorie here,

Nice to see a fellow YC Startup school in here :)

Now to the point.

When you are starting out, you have to resist the urge of having to build a lot of functionality. Just focus on one use case that people are going to be able to easily describe to other people.

Word of advise, launch quickly. Is better to figure out soon that a feature ( “you” thought it would make sense on your product) doesn’t actually work, rather than having to wait 6-7 months down the road to find out.

At the beginning don’t worry about dispatch settings, fancy algorithms, fancy codes etc etc.. the first thing at the beginning is just getting the company off the ground.

Trust me, your first product won’t probably be the one that scales the company, you will find that product by talking to your already existing customers about what they really need.

I know that of this may sound counterintuitive, but as you learned in YC; do things that don't scale ( initially)

The faster you validate your idea, the better your product will get over time. Just launch already.

Hope this helps,

Cheers!

My co-founder and I were grappling with this question until I read "The Lean Startup" by Eric Ries.

Now we're getting super-agressive with the product feature backlog, dumping all the nice-to-have functionality and racing to get a minimal viable product (MVP) in front of paying customers to see how they react.

One of the insights in the book that's given us confidence to do this is that many early adopters actually WANT something that only just functions and is a bit buggy - if it's too polished they don't feel like they have the inside track on something new. This lack of early adoption can kill your product before it can make it to the next stage of growth.

As you iterate & your product matures, you can grow your customer base and begin to address your early majority customers, who have higher expectations of the product.

Or at least that's Eric's theory!

I love the simplicity of the app you're creating. Good job!

The right time to launch is yesterday.

'If you're not embarrassed by your product when you launch, you launched too late'

I love the problem you are trying to solve - good luck!

Now! Don't add any other features, don't fix more bugs or refactor your code again. Try to get someone to pay for it today. Talk to someone that might be interested IRL and if they won't pay, ask them why. Find out what's holding them back and try to fix that as quickly as possible. Repeat until strangers are buying from you.

@csallen, I can generate my post view count by refreshing forum page.