Here’s a quote I love …
Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn once said, “if you’re not embarrassed by your first release, then you launched too late.”
I heard this saying years ago and always share it with my consulting clients. But as with most “sayings” it’s much easier to say than it is to apply.
When you wait to launch, you lose valuable time to slowly gauge two important things.
First, if it functions correctly. But second, how people respond to it.
This can help inform not just your product, but also your marketing. The feedback you get can help inform how you talk about your product.
For example, the language people use in their feedback (specific words, phrases, etc) can help you start to create a lexicon to draw from for future content and marketing efforts. And that’s just one example of how to apply the early feedback you get!
Last week I launched a little test of a new customer journey to a few thousand people. I actually wanted to wait and launch it this week, but I could also hear the clock ticking and I knew that for every day I didn’t launch it, I was losing out on getting feedback.
So I launched it, and bad news…
It was broken (I’ll spare you the details)!
But the good news is that I was able to quickly fix it after an hour chatting with customer support.
And the even better news is that I got a lot of feedback from people. Mostly positive feedback but there was also some negative feedback. But all feedback is good feedback if you ask me!
I know you are probably holding on to something that you should have launched last week or even last month.
So whatever that is, my challenge to you this week is to just launch it. It’s fine if you launch it quietly to only a few people instead of telling everyone, but I promise you won’t regret it!
And remember, you don’t have to launch it to the world.
It’s ok to start by telling a handful of people. But the point is to get it out there. Because as I said earlier…
All feedback is good feedback.
Feedback will help you understand your potential customers / users and shape the product based on their feedback.
The last thing you want to do is create in a vacuum and miss out on great ideas that can come from your audience.