Why you should launch your MVP early

We started working on Postly (https://usepostly.com) from the 1st week of August 2021 and first launched our MVP on the 22nd of November, 2021 (almost 4 months of intense dev work) and that is where we got the first users and tons of feedback.

It was a scary experience but a good one.

So far, with minimal spending on paid ads and aggressive push to all popular online communities, (including Product Hunt with over 100 upvotes and great comments), we were able to onboard 300+ users and earn about $4,000 in revenue.

Launching with real paying customers is the best, but also not an easy task because the users would “roast” your product, it was like being on the hot-seat for the whole period of the launch, but then you’ll get valuable feedback.

The first thing I noticed was that the fancy things I had in mind in terms of product features and direction were not really what the customers wanted - most of them just wanted to be able to schedule posts on as many social platforms as possible and when it gets published, it should just up nicely on the platforms.
Also, I realized the customers were extremely aware and knowledgeable and were specific to the features they wanted and how they wanted them.
I maintained a very open mind and ensured I was always the one managing the Hubspot chat tool.
We received ALL the feedback and applied it to the product, validating most of our initial assumptions. This also helped us to re-align our product positioning - it became clear we were right in position for the business segment (SMEs). These customers naturally signed up and almost immediately started using the platforms actively daily.

For feature suggestions I didn’t believe in 100%, I would typically make a note of it and once I get the same request from a different user, I would engage the dev team immediately! I intended to do this for the first few months of the product growth till we get a good market fit and product stability.
These revelations helped me refocus at the early stages and start building what mattered.
Build fast!
Launch fast!
Learn and relearn fast!