This week we just launched a new product at GoSquared: Lead Forms.
Launches are always exciting, and every time we do a launch we learn from it, so I decided to focus this episode of Lost and Founder on the topic of launching.
As I’ve written in the past, I feel launching is a bit like inviting your friends or relatives over to your house. Inviting someone over forces you to get your house in order — to tidy, to prepare for a deadline, and to prioritise unfinished tasks.
When launching a product or a feature, or even launching a whole new business, it’s often difficult to know when to do it. You’re pretty much always going to launch too early or too late — from my experience, it’s almost impossible to launch “perfectly on time”.
If you’re getting ready to launch something, I hope this episode is helpful for you.
Actions / take aways
I’ve outlined some key actions and take-aways for those too busy to listen to the full thing:
- Set a deadline for your launch — every time you do this you learn how to get better at setting deadlines.
- Assign an owner if you're in a team — if more than one person “owns” a project, then no one actually owns it.
- Be clear on your priorities — ensure everyone is aware of what is most important to the launch and the company.
- If in doubt, optimise for speed — moving faster tends to solve more problems than it creates. Speed means you learn faster.
Links and further reading
- Launching is like inviting friends over
- Move fast
- Patrick Collison’s list of people accomplishing ambitious things together
- When is it good enough to ship?
- Ship early, ship often
Subscribe for future episodes
If you haven't already, it'd mean the world to me if you subscribe to Lost and Founder wherever you get your podcasts — find all the links to subscribe here.
Thanks and see you next time!