5 Reasons to delay your product launch
We strongly believe in release early and often. However when you work with other partners or customers, they may not think the same. So in a few years we have had experience with opposite ends and we have learned from it: Although I still believe it is bad to delay your launch just to get more features in there, there are very good reasons that should stop you from launching your product.
1. You’re product is not clear. If you can’t summarize in a few sentences what users get out of your product and what action they need to take to get that, you might be in trouble. If you can, make sure that this message is also supported by your homepage. Not only the ‘what’ but maybe even more important: the action users need to take.
2. You’re marketing is not in place. There is really no point in releasing a product without a plan on how to gain customers. If you are not able to start promoting your product, what’s the point? Nothing feels more disappointing than releasing a product and getting no feedback at all.
3. You can’t even use it. Aiming to release early does not mean delivering a barely working product. Attention for usability must be included in the most basic version. So if you’ve got low quality instead of less quality features go back to the drawing board.
4. It’s not that impressive. Expectations on design and usability have grown quickly over last few years. Users are no longer impressed by just a good look, you need to impress them with your product, but not just the product: the whole experience has to ooze the quality you deliver.
5. You did not review and test the code. Especially if you have outsourced development, I think you need to closely examine the quality of your product internals. If you can’t do it yourself, hire someone. Even the best developers make mistakes and take shortcuts once in a while. Even if you have tested everything, you are still going to find lots of bugs and flaws in the first weeks, so the more you find yourself, the sooner you will get real feedback. If you believe you can rely on bugreports by users: you can’t.
It all comes down to attention to detail. Some product make it because they are game changing ideas, others are just lucky. However most products only make it because there is someone that is obsessed by every single detail, even when running into unwilling designers, developers or marketeers.
Tags: details, launch, product development
A 36 year old entrepreneur and developer. I am currently obsessed with monitoring at