“Build first launch later” or “Launch first build later”?

@jesuschain Pretty much.

My first business I built the product then tried to sell it. I found distribution is a much bigger challenge than building the tech.

My second business, I’ve sold the product before I’ve built it. It’s validated the business. I know I’m building something people want. I’ve got a good go to market strategy and know how I will scale up distribution. Now I need to finish the product!
 
@lettuce Agree with you from experience and first principles.

But I've found it hard to get people to even talk to me to sell first. How do you sell without having something tangible to show to them? How did you sell your product for your second business? Did you show them a prototype or a pitch deck? Would you be able to share that?
 
@ericro This is just a simple counter-point, but some of the most valuable feedback you’re going to get is from your customer base. You might save yourself both time and money by launching and seeing what the market says about your product. It’s likely to be met with criticism and specs or abilities customers would like to see but that will help guide your build.

Have you done any customer discovery at this stage? If you have done enough then maybe trying to get your MVP ready before a larger launch is a good idea. Ultimately, you’re going to want to know what your customer base wants, what’s important to them, and putting a product to market to tests and understand customer interests can be really valuable.
 
@ericro Building first and asking people if they want it later is rolling the dice. You might waste months and months of your time only to find out that people don't want it enough.

I'd recommend looking into something like the lean startup methodology to learn how to validate your ideas before you start building them. You can (kind of) validate with pretty low cost means like a landing page or for free by just asking and talking to whoever you think your target customers will be.
 
@tigersense Honestly it's highly unlikely that someone will steal your idea. Ideas are virtually worthless until executed. The only thing you gain by keeping your idea a secret is a first mover advantage (if you're first). If not then you're just missing out on tons of feedback and validation.

Most people don't steal good new ideas because they take time and effort to implement AND they are unproven. It's only once you get your lambo that people will be trying to steal your ideas.

Also consider the fact that the hottest entrepreneur trend of 2024 is building from scratch in public.
 
@unchosen I think you’re spot on.

Do you know of any products/people that are building in the open? I’m actually leaning towards doing something like this
 
@ericro I was part of start that had "launch first build later" approach. Here 6 years after the MVP still haven't l been fully build, and the CEO is still travelling and trying to get customers into a his vision.

Not speaking about when we did manage raise money, the money were spent of sales and marketing people, while the MVP was still in development. The sales and marketing people outnumbered us 3 to 1. He ran out of funds, people left, and the MVP was half built.

If you have something that is easy to build sure "launch first build later" approach or you want to test in small scale for now, sure, that approach can work. But building the MVP is always going to be the bottleneck, so don't underestimate how effort, money and time it's going to cost. Not just an afterthought. Until you have a functional MVP at hand, the customers that you get to buy into your vision is sand between your hands.
 
@vaninha_cris I am personally experiencing underestimating the time it took to build the MVP. At first I thought I’ll be done in 1 month. It’s been 6 months now I feel a bit more confident about launching next month (strictly from a functionality pov, not so much from a ux pov).
 
@ericro Yeah same, I currently building an MVP (just frontend as it the main part of my MVP) spending 15-18 hours weekly of my free time. I initially thought it would take 7-8 to build that out, but here I am 6 months in, and I'm pretty much only halfway. So it looks like it's going to take more like +12 months. But I'm slowly getting there!

There are always some refactoring, figuring out on the way, and fixing bugs that slows you down.
 
@devin_rogers54 Well, without react or any other frontend language I can't build the MVP. The thing I'm building can't be build with no-code tools. Believe me, I'm quite familiar with no-code tools on what they can do and can't do.
 
@vaninha_cris Lol no, rails and php are both used for web apps. You can pepper javascript around apps as needed.
It sounds like you only know javascript, so I guess react is your choice to be productive. If that’s the case, there’s nothing to be done indeed, I’d adjust the delivery expectations to months like you implied
 
@vaninha_cris That smells like mismanagement. You shouldn’t hire sales people before the founders have acquired at least a few users, and an MVP is almost always something that can be built in weeks (not years)
 
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