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Daniel Benoni

Build, market, measure in parallel - LaunchBit - 0 views

blog.launchbit.com/ild-market-measure-in-parallel

build market measure lean launchbit yin

shared by Daniel Benoni on 15 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • First-time web entrepreneurs often tell me "Oh we're moving really quickly...we're launching in just 6 months."
  •  The trouble is that product traction isn't just about getting a product out the door.
  • Your biggest competitor isn't any company or individual.  It's time -- the duration you have before you run out of money, morale, and the enthusiasm your significant other/family has for your endeavors.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The trouble with my last company was that our experience in software development came from large companies, where your job is just to ship code.
  • So we thought that a launch was just about writing the code.  And, we did that in 6 months.  But, what we didn't account for was that in a startup, you don't have a ready large group of users just waiting to use your product. So, your launch time must also include a cycle of user experience and marketing.
  • So, if you do everything in series in a drawn out way like we did: build, market, measure, it's a cycle that can turn months into years.  Eric Ries suggests that shortening an iterative loop and going through such a loop multiple times quickly is the key to success.  I would take that a step further and suggest not only cutting activities to shorten that loop, but to do as much of this loop in parallel.
  • Our workflow looks like this: get your Unbounce or LaunchRock page up from Day 1 and start marketing before you have a product.  You can gauge interest and get signups from the very beginning until you're done with the first iteration of the product.  Start getting the Craigslist posts out there on Day 1 to get feedback and potential customers immediately.  Once you have enough of an idea of what to build, start mocking up your idea.  Get those mocks back out to potential customers to make sure you're on the right track.  Iterate as much as possible on paper before building, because it's much faster to re-draw than to re-code.  "Delete features" on your paper prototypes as well, reducing what you need to actually build in code.  Try to code as little as possible to shrink that build time to about 1-2 weeks.  By the time you're done building your first prototype, you've already acquired users from doing marketing in parallel.  This puts you in a position to start measuring usage and gauging interest immediately before iterating through that loop again.
  • Build, market, measure should happen as much as possible in parallel to reduce your launch time and keep your money, morale, and support up.
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