You Only Get a Single Chance
It's common knowledge, almost folk wisdom: "Go to market as early as possible". But while this advice is undoubtedly true, there's also a downside to it. Because some people will give your product only a single look.
This is a new post in our series "A Word of Advice".
Going to market early is crucial. Because only when real people have your real product in hands (and not a free prototype) will you ever have a chance to learn how to make a truly great product.
This is true even though you'll have to make some compromises - because going to market early means that your version 1.0 will be lacking. Features will be missing, bugs will be many...
When we released version 1.0 of our own product, Tower, we (too) went to market without a lot of features that we wished we had. When people tried our software, some were disappointed: they were missing feature X or Y.
And while today, with version 1.5, we have all those features and even more, some of those people never gave us a second look. They had saved us in their memory as the software that doesn't support X or Y.
The advice remains true: Go to market as early as possbile. But make sure you ship the best features you're capable of. Because some people will only give you a single chance.
