Like most people, you probably think you shouldn’t launch something — a business, a product, a project — until it’s 100% “ready.” Here’s why that’s so, so wrong.
Perfectionism
In First Grade, my teacher pulled me aside to say it was nice I answered questions correctly, but I should try to raise my hand even if I wasn’t sure of the answer. I thought she was crazy. Why would I raise my hand if I didn’t have the right answer? What if I was wrong?!
Ahh, the plight of a tiny perfectionist.
As adults, we think, “I won’t know how to run a business until I have an MBA,” or “I can’t finish this book without a professional designer,” or “I shouldn’t launch my app until all the features are done.”
The fear of launching something half-baked, incorrect, or disliked is a such powerful deterrent that many of us fail to even get started… let alone to launch.
But there’s a better way.
Feedback
If your goal is to build a good, useful, or profitable product, you need one thing above all else: user feedback.
You need feedback — both qualitative and quantitative — from real customers about what they want, need, and like. Even better, what they want, need, and like about your product.
Without this, there’s no way to know if you’re building something people will use. You could spend years perfecting a product no one wants. That would suck.
As quickly as possible, you want to know: “What should I change about my product?”
Minimum Viable Product
But how can you get feedback on a product if it doesn’t even exist yet?
Here’s where the un-perfectionism comes in.
You need to build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP): the barest-bones product that your customer can use. (This term originally comes from Scrum / Agile / Lean.) The MVP won’t have all of your desired features; it might just have one or two. It won’t have a beautiful design; it might look like a website from 1993. That’s okay. In fact, that’s the point! You’re sacrificing “perfection” for user feedback, which is so much more valuable.
Yes, you might feel embarrassed by your MVP. You think it could be so much better! But it doesn’t really matter how you think it could be better. You want to know, from customer data, how it should be better.
Building an MVP (aka the cupcake story)
Are you on board with launching an MVP? Great!
But what exactly should go into an Minimum Viable Product? How do you get started?
Start by listing all the desired features you want your product to have. Let’s say my product is a wedding cake. My desired features might be three tiers, white frosting, intricate design, delicious content, and enough quantity to feed 100 people.
It would be pretty disappointing if I built out all the whole cake, only to discover that my customer wanted chocolate instead of vanilla. At that point, it wouldn’t matter that I’d spent hours on the design.
So I’m forced to put some features on the back burner. I decide that my MVP is just a cupcake. This is the “barest-bones product my customer can use,” allowing me to get quick and essential feedback.
Once I give my customers the cupcake, they give me the thumbs up on the taste. So I build out another feature, such as the frosting. Suddenly my customer tells me that they’re stoked about having cupcakes at their wedding! They think it’s cute, quirky, and less fussy than a huge cake.
Good thing I didn’t try to build the three-tier cake before launching!
Moral of the story
Yes, it’s scary to launch before your product is perfect.
But you should do it anyway.
Because that’s the only way to get what you want… Happy customers.
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Action items:
〉 Identify a product you want to build.
〉 Outline all the product’s desired features.
〉 Select the one or two features required for the MVP.
〉 Build and launch the MVP, sharing it with customers.
〉 Gather feedback and adjust your development plans accordingly.
〉 Bonus points: Read more about Scrum / Agile / Lean (where the idea of MVP comes from).