Why you shouldn’t wait to ‘feel ready’ to launch your product. (Notion guide inside)

Ahmed Men
4 min readMar 11, 2020

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Lazy has won the golden kitty 2019 for the Smart-home category 🎉

I feel so humbled — this is an amazing win for Lazy and I’m beyond excited to follow in Notion’s footsteps. 😃

It may look clumsy to make that comparison but at the end of the day, the ultimate ambition is to build such a well-rounded product, don’t you think? Let’s dream big and trigger a self-fulfilling prophecy for Lazy. 🔮

If you also wonder what Golden Kitties are, they are awards given by Product Hunt once a year to celebrate all the best products and makers.

What a surprise, honestly.

As a reminder, the first version of Lazy is a command line to control your connected devices:

A big thanks to Dailytekk for mentioning Lazy in their video “The MOST Unbelievably Useful Mac Apps Episode Yet!

I did not expect so much love around this V1. So much so, confession time, that I had a content strategy ready before the launch on ‘Why my Launch was a Fail’ and ‘How I am pivoting’. In retrospect, this was a waste of time. Here is why:

In reality, this pivot was already anticipated by Lazy users — 4000 at this point, and still growing! I received requests to extend use cases in a way that was already aligned with my initial vision. Moreover, great investors who expressed their interest, identified the same next steps for Lazy.

The saying “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” is a cliché for a reason but I can’t emphasise this enough — put your ego aside and constantly ask yourself: could I skip this step to activate a feedback loop quicker? If skipping a step means no code, go for it!

Secret Sauce for a successful Product Hunt launch

I am so grateful for the continuous support from the Lazy community so as a thank you, I want to share here a step by step Notion and Airtable template which shows you how I reached 1200 upvotes; and ultimately won this Golden Kitty Award.

Founders, marketers, you’ll find ton of blogposts on how to launch, but this doc will make you save a bunch of time.

Just leave a comment on this Tweet or post on Linkedin and I’ll send you the link in PM:

Why am I asking you this?

I am looking for a killer CTO/Co-founder for the next Lazy step (let’s meet at the end of the post) and I want to make the information visible to the largest number possible to find someone as obsessed as I am with their productivity workflows. 🙏

What’s next for Lazy?

A week after the Product Hunt launch I took a one-way flight to San Francisco. The goal was to meet some of my early users for coffee as well as potential investors. I wanted to understand what about Lazy got their attention and how big they thought Lazy could go. It goes without saying it was not the IoT part.

After having identified the Lazy’s persona, I set myself the arbitrary goal to meet 100 potential users in person for this V2 and I learned so much — (un)validated a ton of hypotheses. I really understood at this point that a MVP is not the outcome of your vision; it is the medium in which your vision takes place.

Now, you might be wondering what the next version of Lazy is all about?!
Well, the big idea for the V2 is not to control devices anymore but services; instead of controlling your lights, vacuum and fans, you’ll be able to connect your task manager, note-taking app, project board or calendar. It will be done with an UX that reduces the cognitive cost of jotting something down, respecting your precious flow, and always designed for speed because the most valuable thing in the world is time.

I believe that the mind’s capacity for different UIs is finite. Browsers are slow and distracting and Lazy helps you achieve inbox zero of your brain without any friction, without any cost to context switching.

Let’s build the ultimate productivity tool together

A productivity software should be in fact a wellness product. They should spark joy and feel like a garden where our digital life seamlessly takes place. 🌱🌿✨ They definitely should be something you use less than the thing you used before. Lazy’s mission is to help you move as fast as your brain when it comes to capturing an idea or pulling and pushing information within all the apps and services you use.

If you’re excited by the perspective of building faster workflows that will free up the time of millions of knowledge workers and if you are available now, let’s have a coffee! I’m in Brussels + Paris and new trips to San Francisco might be in the cards.

Meanwhile, stay tuned on https://www.lazy-app.com — some cool stuff coming soon!

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