The One Rule for Product Development

In my experience of building products that have failed miserably and/or have been moderately successful. One of the most, if not THE MOST important learning that I’ve had is to NEVER OVERBUILD. I repeat… DO NOT OVERBUILD.

In the book Blitzscaling, Reid Hoffman says “Launch a Product that embarrasses you”. He goes on to say, and I’m paraphrasing here — Any product that you’ve carefully refined based on your instincts rather than real user interactions and data from the market, is likely to miss the mark and will require significant re-engineering.

In the book The Lean Start-Up, Eric Ries gives us the principles of “Build-Measure-Learn”. These three steps encompass the principles of building products that are surrounded by uncertainty.

So, yes, don’t be afraid to launch a product that embarrasses you but while you’re at it, also make sure that the product you do launch puts you in a position by which you can verify and validate the assumptions you made in the first place. And the only way to do that is Market Feedback. There is nothing that guarantees success and is sweeter — than 100s of angry customers breathing down your neck, asking you to fix the damn product. In conclusion, launch a super skimpy product with the essentials, test the living heck out of them, make rapid changes and repeat. Unless you’re Elon Musk of course, in which case, hey man… how’s it going?

Put your thoughts below, like the video, follow me up there and hopefully, I’ll see you in the next one.

Learn ‘How To Build A SaaS Side-Hustle That Actually Makes Money’ — For Programmers and Hackers That Can Build Software Independently.

Use Coupon Code ‘launch30’ for 30% off.