Was delaying our product launch the right decision?
Probably not — here is why, and what we learned from it.
Reid Hoffman — among other things known for PayPal, LinkedIn, and for being a prolific angel investor — said it best: “If you’re not embarrassed about the first version of your product, you launched too late”.
There’s definitely something to be said for that: You learn a lot more from real customers than you do from private beta customers, customer development interviews, and gut feel.
The core tenet of agile and lean production is to minimise waste. Waste is created when you do work that isn’t necessary, or if you over-optimise certain things before they’re needed.
Launching early = reducing waste
The opposite of agile is often referred to as ‘waterfall’ delivery, where you spec out the whole project up front, go ahead and design and code it, test it, then ship. The big question that follows is: Are you really delivering what the customer needs? And if you’ve somehow managed to get that wrong, how much time and money has been wasted on developing functionality that doesn’t solve the customer’s core problems? Or, in other words: You’ve created waste.
To minimise waste, then, launching early makes sense: You create a bare-bones version of what you want to do, then put it out in front of your customers. They’ll be able to give guidance on what you have so far, including what does and doesn’t work well, which parts of the functionality is too difficult to use, and — most crucially — exploring whether the problems the customers are trying to solve are actually solved by the product.
Understanding why is pretty straightforward: It’s all about an existing problem, and whether customers are willing to pay what you’re trying to charge in order to solve that problem. (or, if you’re in the entertainment business — whether your delight-to-dollars ratio is appropriate for your target audience)
Why didn’t we launch faster?
We’ve been itching to launch our ScreenCloud Signage (previously known as SignCloud) and ScreenBox products, but have been scuppered a few times. At the beginning of September, we did ‘just one last test’ on some of the core functionality of the platform, and discovered that… It just didn’t work properly. More specifically: video playback was very laggy indeed, which meant that the product wasn’t fit for purpose for the customers who were expecting smooth video playback. Which includes almost all of them.
“But Haje”, I hear you cry, “How is that possible, for a product that’s been in development for well over a year?”
Excellent question.
It turns out that a lot of our early testing had been done in lab conditions, and that we focused early on having a very wide selection of different players. The problem is that our customers are extremely varied: Yes, there are offices with perfect Wi-Fi conditions among them (like in our fibre-internet-tastic office), but we also have restaurants, bicycle shops, bars, tanning salons, and university campuses that have… well, let’s say less than ideal internet connectivity.
So, while we were beavering away making our UI better (and it’s pretty damn sexy), and creating dozens upon dozens of players, what we were in fact doing was creating a load of technical debt (half-finished players that work only in lab conditions) and waste (investing development time in the wrong challenges).
We didn’t truly discover the problem until that ‘one last test’ moment a couple of months ago, when we went into a customer’s environment to do a quick install and test of our systems; and at that point, we decided to delay the launch for a while, while we ironed out the kinks.
We’re always going to lose a few customers here and there if the product doesn’t quite fit with what they want, but that is OK
Was launching late the correct decision?
Probably not. A lot of the issues that ended up delaying the launch at the last minute would have been found a lot earlier, had we invited customers to an open Beta. Of course, at that point, the product would have been live, and we may have had some grumpy customers early on — but we’d at least have a very clear picture of how wide-spread the issue is, and how much of our customer base would be affected.
But there’s also another realisation — a more subtle one. We’re always going to lose a few customers here and there if the product doesn’t quite fit with what they want, but that is OK. No product is all things to all people. If customers in the act of trialling the product are able to give us a set of data points around what works and what doesn’t, the customers are in effect helping us fine-tune and improve the products along the way.
So what did we learn?
It’s probably worth launching earlier rather than later; As it turned out, some of the things we thought might be problematic, weren’t — and some of the things we thought weren’t problems, were. All of that would have been clearer had we launched earlier.
Having said that — we’re live now, but we’re still developing like crazy. So; Check out the video below for a quick intro…
… or, better yet, head over to our site and sign up for a free 30-day trial of ScreenCloud Signage, and let us know how you get on with it!
