One of my fears is that the first impression is so important. It's very hard to make people try your product for a second time. Reviews get written and it's not like people are gonna update their reviews when all the issues have been fixed.
That's how Cuil, the company that tried to build a search engine to compete with Google, blew it. Big PR push, huge initial traffic, initial product sucked, traffic disappeared, product got better but nobody cared, VCs pulled plug, company bankrupt. I got to watch that one happen.
There seems to be endless goalpost moving around this though. Do you release as soon as you possibly can and learn and validate, or release a relatively polished product and have a strong initial base of customers help finesse it?
It's also kind of hard to get meaningful feedback without some kind of big PR push.
The way I approach it is as a pyramid. First version, really shitty, I just need to get few customers/users and get him/her interested. if they see big holes, go fix it and come back. Work on fixing smaller holes and other features, collect feedback from a slightly larger audience. Repeat such feedback/iteration cycles.
As product becomes more mature, increase size until you have a 1.0, at which point you have a loyal fan base that loves the product and is willing to pay. Then you go full PR, market like crazy and burn VC money in growth.
The point is at each stage you are still validating and gathering feedback without the risk of losing out on a large number of customers.
>It's also kind of hard to get meaningful feedback without some kind of big PR push.
In my experience, you can get meaningful feedback by watching one, or ten, or a hundred users use your app. Indeed, given the level of tailoring that you can (and should) do to pick the first batch of users, you should be able to give them very close attention
If you don't have evangelists in your early-alpha userbase, then something is probably wrong.
It's not an either or - the second (money) merely is a lot easier if the first exists. I've seen startups soon dominated by thoughts of the private jet for the executives and all thoughts dominated by money, wealth and power. Guess what suffered: Actually developing the f...ing product. Lots of internal power struggles, because fast growth leads to a lot of fancy new job titles and offices.
If money is the #1 motivating factor you'll create the company mirroring your goals. Doesn't mean you won't be successful - one of the companies I didn't mention was eventually sold for hundreds of millions (but that was down from billions of projected value earlier after they screwed up due to what I mentioned) - but you can increase your chances of success if your actual product is actually important to you, and if it solves an actual problem.
I think this is less important on the web than native. Iterative releases feel natural on the web. If something solves a real problem I'll use it while they work out design kinks.
I completely agree, one of the reasons that we've been reluctant to release is that we've been developing a native app. Considering how long it takes to push a bug fix, with Apple approving and all, you can expect 4 days of downtime if you really screw up.
If you compare that with web, as many pointed out my article had a lot of spelling errors but that was easily corrected.
The real challenge is testing your assumptions without ever releasing an app or website :)
I used to agree with this but it's unlikely a MVP will get enough traction to truly damage a software brand. Of course, this depends on the medium (computer software [harder to update] vs website service) and target audience (investor vs public) and if your audience understands it's a MVP.
Question is: should a user come by your MVP now or in six months when it's "done"? The earlier people see your product and not like it, the earlier you can hone it for future users. Plus, a final version could be rebranded if the MVP was that bad.
Granted, I fell into this trap with my website. I kept putting it's release off and now am learning how to refine it as I see how it's used by others.
For instance, I thought the news section of my site (http://www.survivalscout.com/news) would be really popular but almost no one visits it. It's my favorite part but I seem to be in the minority according to the logs. If I had known that earlier, I may have spent less time making it.
I'd say it's most important that you are solving an important problem. If you solve the problem well, no one will care if the product is ugly as shit. So long as you are the only or the best solution out there, it doesn't matter. :-)
The solution to that is to properly set expectations. If you're releasing an early preview or MVP as if it's a polished final product then yeah, you'll get bad reviews. If you set expectations of "This is a preview release to get feedback so we can make changes to meet YOUR needs" then you should get feedback. If you've set expectations properly and get bad reviews at that point you should be able to go back to them and note that the review was for an early-stage trial balloon.
If you get a 2 star average on yelp on grand opening of your new restaurant, a lot of people won't even bother coming even if you fixed most of the complaints.
You solve that by doing a limited first release. Don't advertise to the whole world or pay for a TV commercial. Target some customer groups you think would like the product and have a few of them use it. The early feedback is invaluable.
Even after you have a mature product, you can trickle out new features this way. Sometimes customers will come to you a feature request and even ask to help you beta test it, because they want it so badly.
Interesting! I've been showing my project to people and I get really strong first impressions - people love it immediately. Which, i guess is great - but what I really need to know is if it's actually useful and solves problems for them, which has been harder to gauge.
I've encountered this problem too. People will say nice things to you when you pitch or show them something because it's easy to be nice and they want you to succeed. Maybe they imagine their optimal future self using your product. But things may not work out that way. There's also the issue of solving a genuine problem but later finding out that it's not a valuable problem.
There is a solution: stop showing people your product and start casually asking them about their problems. Then you can begin to understand if you are solving real problems and how much people care about them, e.g. if they have already parted with money (or time) trying to solve them. Don't ask leading questions, but do prompt them for specific details about their actions. Don't ask anything where the answer is to any degree hypothetical. It only takes five minutes, just don't mention your product!
Of course this requires you to be in the same room as your potential evangelist early-adopter customers. Go put yourself in that room ASAP.
