| I'm sure a lot of this is not new for some of you. I'm working on a product [1] and had all sorts of assumptions that I am revisiting after reading this. I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. This set me right. I have been obsessing over the big launch. I laughed at myself after reading this. And on a tuesday, of course, since they read somewhere that's the optimum day to launch something. Yep, that's me. I'm anticipating ridicule from my friends. The need to do something unscalably laborious to get started is so nearly universal that it might be a good idea to stop thinking of startup ideas as scalars. Instead we should try thinking of them as pairs of what you're going to build, plus the unscalable thing(s) you're going to do initially to get the company going. I kept thinking that adding features was the way to keep getting more customers. My minimum viable product was a build system + share-new-version-with-beta-users. The laborious things I needed to do to acquire new customers I thought were adding new features: add a package manager, add test integration feature, add a code review tool, add iOS support, and so on. It just dawned on me that I haven't thought about the other laborious things I need to pay attention to: meet with the numerous mobile developers I know, do demos at local meetups, and constantly talk to people about my product. [1] https://appramp.io/ |