I get so many entrepreneurs telling me that their product isn't ready to be launched. While you definitely have to have something to launch, you almost surely don't need something as good as you think.
As a reminder, here's what the Amazon.com site looked like when it launched:
You might say, "but that was a long time ago. the world has changed." Oh yeah? Here's what Twitter's site looked like in 2006 when it launched:
And YouTube's site in 2005 when it launched:
The point is, you don't need a great site as much as you need a great product. These products succeeded in spite of their sites because they were that good.
So put your time into creating a killer product before you focus on putting lipstick on a pig.
Another great (and very recent) example is a bug testing service called Crittercism. When I met these guys, probably in 2011, they were a small team with a really cheeky mascot eating a cookie. Here's what it looked like back then:
But there service is so valuable to app developers that they were able to get really significant traction and raise a Series A. Here's that same company today:
(It's awesome what some great customer traction and a few million dollars will do!)
And that's my point. Just make a product that a group is passionate about -- even if it's a small group. Way better to have 100 people love you than 100,000 people not care and not engage. As Dave McCLure says in his "Startup Metrics for Pirates" presentation (at the bottom of this blog post),
"Get your users to love you or hate you, as long as they're not indifferent. Indifference is the kiss of death, at least if they hate you, you have something to iterate on."
Amen Dave.
I was recently approached by a friend in the venture capital industry who asked me to write about my experience as an entrepreneur and transplant to Silicon Valley. Here's the resulting transcript of our discussion. I'm publishing it in the hopes that it helps other entrepreneurs, as well as those who haven't yet taken the leap but want to.
Can you tell me about the fundraising cycles your company has gone through?
We began in Washington D.C. in 2008 in a townhouse on Capitol Hill. It was a terrible time to fundraise due to the financial crisis, so we self-funded a mobile consulting firm called PointAbout which built mobile apps for large brands, including Disney, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Newsweek, Cars.com and many others. That firm quickly grew to over 30 employees (and a much nicer space in DC -- although still a townhouse!)
I'm trying to write something personal improvement related every Monday and a story every Wednesday. I hope these are interesting to people, because I generally think that most personal improvement articles are relatively useless.
Every couple weeks I scan through lifehacker.com, and inevitably think "Man... this is a lot of useless junk."
Now... I've definitely found some good stuff there, and have had some of my articles featured there, so it's not ALL bad. I just feel like most personal improvement stuff is geared more towards FEELING like something has been accomplished rather than actually taking action.