5 Lessons to Follow as You Take Your Product to Market

The following excerpt is from Scott Duffy's book Breakthrough. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iBooks | IndieBound

When launching a new business, product, or service, the most common mistake entrepreneurs make is trying to do too many things at once in the belief that going to market with "more" is better.

It isn't. During your initial launch period, or when relaunching new products or services, "more" means additional risk. More also means unnecessary complexity, as well as additional time to market, so more capital will be required.

Below are some important things to remember as you prepare to take your product to market:

1. Don't try to build Rome in a day

I have a good friend who raised $2 million in a very tough market to start a consumer internet business. Finding that much money to start a new business was amazing, and I congratulated him on a big win. He was ecstatic and told me he couldn't wait to get to work on the site.

One year later, I ran into him again and asked how it was going. He sang the blues. He said he was doing terribly. In fact, he was on his way to his attorney's office to shut the company down. They had launched a few months before but had already run out of money. I asked how that was possible, and he talked about his big vision, how his company aimed to provide everything their target customer could possibly want to buy in the category. Their goal was to be a one-stop shop. He and his team invested all their time and money building something big and comprehensive, confident their target customer wouldn't want to go anywhere else once their website was up and running.

When the company got started, they were solving one problem for one target customer. It was a simple concept. But when the money came in, everyone started working on other "great ideas" and "shiny objects." They kept building and building and building. They went from solving one problem for one very specific target customer to building a one-stop shop that did a lot of things for a lot of different people. Then they started running low on cash, so they decided to push the product out.

After the launch, they learned, much to their surprise, that about 95 percent of their users used just 5 percent of the site! And that 5 percent was the original product to solve the original problem...

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/319617

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Idham Azhari