Just Do It
Moving from Idea to Product
From Idea to Product: Test Your Idea in the Real World
Just do it. Put it out there. Get something into the real world that can react to. That's the launch mindset. It's not about perfection. It's not even about completion. It's about getting started by getting real. Something's not real for a community until they can use it. When they touch and feel it, they react to it. That's where powerful learning begins. That's when you realize what your product or service needs to do to thrive.
With the learning you've done so far, you've made the groundwork for launch. You have a sense of what people are looking for in this community. You understand the kinds of things they do day in, day out. You know what keeps them up at night. So you understand what some find inspiring.
You also have scouted the landscape of services that already exist. You can learn almost as much from people's behaviors and attitudes towards existing services -publications, sites, apps, etc- as you can from their reaction to yours. As an illustration of that point, those starting new magazines have long been a favorite of magazines love. For example, some service magazines include pages you can tear out with recipes or how-to guides. That practice has spread because industry observers see how people behave with the magazines they love.
As you move through the launch phase, you'll continue testing not just your own product or service, but alternative as well. That will help you identify new product characteristics, features or capabilities that could strengthen your offering. Because the alternative services are already out in the world, it's easy to use them to gauge people's reactions to particular features.
Once you're in the community with a community and aware of the services, it's time to start experimenting. The objective in the launch phase is to test hypotheses. You may have a hunch that professional gardeners will be happy to give you new care about new seeds. Whatever your hypothesis is, once you've laid the groundwork by doing some learning, you're in a good position to begin testing your ideas.
In this chapter we start with a quick exercise to help you begin testing your ideas. Your objective early on in the entrepreneurial process is to get something out of the door and into the hands of your customer. Once your reader (or listener or viewer) is engaging with you, even if it's an early iteration, you'll have an initial sense of what you're doing on the right track. You'll have some signals about adjustments you need to make.
"You do not learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing and by falling over. "- Richard Branson
Chances are you’ll make some mistakes during the launch process. That’s fine, because you’ll start with a friends and family launch. Those kind souls—who knew you in diapers—or perhaps as a high-school ice cream-eating champ—will forgive you for wasting their time, if you occasionally do. They’ll stick with you as your product or service improves. Hopefully they’ll also be blunt with you when something isn’t working. Or they’ll give you the hug you need when you’re considering giving up.
It’s useful to get the early errors out of the way so you can learn from them. The version of your product that eventually reaches a bigger community will be better by virtue of being version five or 12 or 27, not version one.
The final part of this section focuses on launching little experiments to test people’s reactions and responses to what you’re developing. We’ll explore 21 methods for testing your ideas and getting input from users. These techniques are especially handy if your content isn’t fully ready or you don’t yet have a full team. Or maybe you aren’t yet committed to investing the time, effort or money required.
Each time you make something— even if it’s not a full version of the product — you can test some aspect of your hypothesis. That allows you to then adapt and refine your idea. These mini tests help increase the likelihood that the product or service that grows out of your repeated experiments will resonate with your community. These experiments also help guide you toward features, product characteristics and marketing messages that may add value to what you’re doing.
People’s reactions and responses to your tests will help you create and refine your roadmap. That’s the map where you’ll make decisions about what elements of your product to build when. It’s an essential document that streamlines collaboration with teammates or partners because it clarifies where the product/service is heading. Users’ input will also help you learn to “kill your babies.” That’s startup-speak for removing features that seem cool but aren’t crucial to users. It’s also a familiar term for journalists facing edit constraints who have to cut flashy quotes or other juicy details.
The section ends by addressing some common questions related to the launch phase. What if my early users hate what I show them? What if I get conflicting feedback? How do I get people to tell me what they really think, not what they think I want to hear?