Why to Test Early

How and Why to Launch Early

Isn’t journalism about avoiding mistakes?

There’s a misconception some would-be journopreneurs have that entrepreneurship is like tightrope walking. They think of it like this: train, prepare, and perfect yourself before risking your neck in public. When you master the tightrope, the public will come running to watch, applaud and pay for your work.

 

In reality, entrepreneurship is more like cooking for a baby. You mash something up and see if the little tyke spits it out or smiles. If you win a smile, you offer more. Or you build on the original dish to see whether she’ll enjoy something similar. If she spits it out, you experiment to see if it’s the texture, flavor, temperature or smell she’s rejecting.  

 

With a media startup, you can’t avoid mistakes. Nothing launches as a perfect whole. When CNN launched in 1980, some mockingly dubbed it the Chicken Noodle Network because it didn’t have the spending power of the bigger TV networks and couldn’t match the quality of their original programming. When recent college graduates Chris Altcheck and Jake Horowitz launched what was then called PolicyMic to draw out the voices of millennials in 2011, it was laughable in comparison with the content and design they went on to build in subsequent years. Mic now serves 19 million monthly readers.  

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” - Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn