[Maro]

The underlying principle is that you have to understand and control the factors affecting your startup's success. If you're not doing so in a meaningful way, you're exposing yourself to large / unknown risk factors, where "large" means "very likely to lead to your failure".

Not having launched the product (esp. in the consumer market) as early as possible is definitely one such factor.

[kj12345]

I agree with what you're saying, but I think the original post went much further. Even with respect to what you're saying I think the paradox is that if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door. And the lessons you learn from customers saying "it doesn't look that valuable" may or may not outweigh the effort it took to launch quickly. Sort of like the way A/B testing can help you make small corrections but probably won't actually create value where there is little to begin with.

[dasil003]

The original post went much further because that's the message the first-time internet entrepreneurs need. There's a tendency among experienced businesspeople doing their first startup to look to their experience in successful companies and try to analyze that success and bring some of those things to the new company.

The problem is that successful companies have layers upon layers of processes and refinements, all of which (in a healthy company) play some role in their ongoing success. But the marginal benefit of 99.99% of these things is irrelevant to a startup, and the assets that an (internet) startup has to protect are nil at the beginning.

This is one of the reasons very young people are often successful despite inexperience; they can focus on building a compelling product—something they've known very intimately for their whole lives growing up with the internet and mobile phones—rather than the trappings of "business".

To get back to your point:

> if you discover that people don't like the product you rushed out the door, it might be because you rushed it out the door.

If you built the wrong product up front, then it's better to learn that by getting real feedback, rather than laboring on a false premise in secret. I think stealth mode has pretty much been debunked by now. The bottom line is that you can launch a shitty product, and it doesn't matter because know one fucking cares. You may have all these grandiose dreams, but getting attention and traction is a huge ongoing uphill muddy slog. If you have a seed of a good idea, but it's very poorly implemented, at least you will pick up a few very early adopters, and they will be the ones providing the most valuable feedback to make the next refinement and layer on the next batch of slightly-less-early adopters.