How to build a business: Launch ASAP

Once you have identified and proven your core advantage, the next step is to launch as soon as possible. There are many reasons for this:

Time is your most important currency
Before you launch your product, you are still paying bills for yourself and your team. The expenses never stop. Depending on the amount of money you have for this stage of business, there is limited amount of time you have till you prove success for the next stage. If you wait too long, you might miss graduating to the next step.

To some extent, the impact of revenues on your company is like impact on savings is on retirement. The sooner you start making money, the faster your business will grow.

Get out of
Occasionally, even though you’re able to prove your idea (before developing the product), you’ll only be able to find insurmountable challenges closer to launch or soon after launch. The sooner are you able to launch, the sooner would you can discover those issues.

Competitors
Typically whenever you are thinking about an idea, at least 5 other people are thinking about the same thing. The longer you wait to launch, the more likely your competition will gain headway. If they are closer to the goal, they might be able to raise more money, or have more revenues – which would lead to lessening your chances of success.

How to launch as soon as you can
You can leverage various strategies to launch your product quickly and effectively. Here are a few:

Identifying the Minimal Viable Product (MVP)
This is an absolutely critical step.. When you start working on your product, every idea can seem like a good idea. It would seem like there are a lot of things you “absolutely can’t leave out” or else the product will be “handicapped” or “incomplete.” However, every extra thing you try to add to your product complicates it, adds to the development roadmap and delays your launch.

So, the most important action step is to identify your core value proposition and only build what you need to achieve that

Don’t spread yourself too thin
Many times people spread themselves too thin by trying multiple platforms or channels. A product builder might build their product for too many platforms – e.g. iOS, Android, Web and others. Others might focus on multiple product acquisition channels like advertising, affiliates, cold calling, etc…

When you’re in the early stages of the product, you are nowhere closer to saturating any of your platforms or channels. If you already have an iOS app, there is potential addressable market of 100s of millions of users available to you. When you have less than one thousand users, adding Android will not make your numbers reach millions of users. It will at best double your numbers.

There are very few cases where you’ll have to build multiple platforms. The most common example are social networking apps, e.g. an instant messaging app. People have a mix of iOS and Android devices, so the only way to get them on board is to have it available on multiple platforms at once.

This is rare. Although you may feel you have to build for multiple platforms, you don’t. So, take a hard look at this before you decide to spread yourself too thin.

Another situation is adding too many features. People believe adding new features only adds a little bit of development work. This could not be further from the truth. For every additional feature, a lot more work is created:

• The product person will need to develop the spec in a way that it integrates seamlessly within the product without hurting the core engagement funnels.
• Engineering will need to spend time building it, likely in a way that it doesn’t contain performance issues and unrelated bugs
• Testers will have to test more features
• Business and Marketing will need to be trained on this feature and find a way to fit this into their story.

Keep your product streamlined so you can launch it as soon as possible. I cannot stress this point enough.