I almost fell into that trap this week with the launch of my new B2B SaaS. Instead, saner heads prevailed and I launched.
Here’s the story and why it’s important to understand this concept.
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Episode Transcript
Hey folks, Sean here, and today what I want to talk to you about is how to get yourself out of your own way so that you can launch, stop obsessing over the little minor details, get your product out there into the hands of users and customers, and start testing it for real. So I mentioned this because I’ve launched a new SaaS this week, and while there are a billion things that I would love to change already and before I launched, I resisted the urge to want to do that because at this point I should know better.
You would think then, you know, I still had a place to track all those things. We’re using a project management system. Trello got all the things that I think might be worthwhile to change about the product experience, but I didn’t let the vast majority of those stop the process of us actually launching.
So the question is, the reason for this is because it’s very easy to get caught in this as a trap. This is like the perfectionist trap, as I typically refer to it as in my product experience is never ready. It has to be perfect, has to be tested a billion times, has to throw zero errors, or has the potential to throw zero errors.
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Nothing needs to be wrong with this thing By the time that I’m launch now, I get it. If you’ve been here, I’ve been here. And it is still something you always have to do your best to try to keep in check. Having said that, anything that goes beyond what I typically call launching at 75%, like we always ship at 75%, is to try to avoid falling into the strap because you can be stuck here forever, as in perfecting a product is not really a thing that’s even theoretically possible in my mind.
So you can continually. Adding features and making tweaks and changing the user experience indefinitely. And that what that’s gonna mean is that you never launch your product, you never get feedback, and you’re not unable to move past that step. So having done that this week with a recent product that I launched, I’m gonna share with you what happened.
Probably relatively obviously, some things broke, right? But we didn’t panic. What did we do? We triaged it, we figured out what wasn’t working and we fixed it. That was literally all that happened. But the good news is that we launched and we figured out what was broken, and some of that stuff that was broken past the testing that we had already done, we probably wouldn’t have caught it had we not launched the product.
So ultimately we got to where we wanted to go faster because we launched. So I’m always an advocate for launching sooner than you feel comfortable. If you feel comfortable about launching, you’re probably launching too late, and I want you to leverage these strategies and keep these things in the back of your mind when you’re thinking about launching your product.
Because you can get stuck in these traps. You can get stuck in these loops forever. . Ultimately, all that matters is you’re gonna pay attention, you’re gonna learn things, and you’re gonna figure out it isn’t perfect. It’s not expected to be, it’s never going to be. So try to temper your expectations when it comes to your product experience and realize that for the best of your product and your customers and users, you want to get it in their hands as soon as possible.
because number one, ultimately the goal here is to validate whether or not it’s providing with the kind of value that you think that it can, and the longer you wait to do. The greater the risk of failure for your overall entire project. But number two, and potentially more importantly related to this lesson, you’re gonna figure out what isn’t working and you’re gonna fix it because that’s exactly what you’re planning to do as you’re building and managing your product along the way.
So that’s a lesson than I want you to take away from this today. I’ve done it myself. It’s an easy trap to fall into, but don’t let yourself fall into it. Just think through methodically the fact. You wanna get your product out there and enhance the customers so you can start performing validation and the fact that you’re gonna pay attention and the stuff that you find you’re gonna fix.