Choose entrepreneurship intelligence: How do we deceive ourselves and postpone release?

I still remember two thoughts in my mind when I first started reading Steve Branch's four-step entrepreneurship law:

• This book is not very attractive.
• From this perspective, it is really amazing to start a company.

It wasn't long before I started a lean startup gathering in New York and started to read Eric Reis ){! [Eric Reis, entrepreneur, writer, and founder of the Lean Startup movement. -- Translator's note]}, has become a believer. One of the key principles of lean entrepreneurship is to publish an early prototype of creativity and solicit opinions from potential users. However, although we are fully engaged in the lean entrepreneurial movement, we have not done this.

Why didn't we release the early prototype?

Our current creative yipit can integrate all the discount information of your city (including sample sales, bar promotions, retail discounts, etc ), then, select the seven most ideal items based on your preferences and geographical locations and send an email to you.

We could have released an early prototype in just a week.

At that time, we were able to track whether people opened emails and clicked links to determine the extent to which this approach was successful. We were able to manually write emails to list the discount information we found, use mailchimp to send emails. At that time, no technical infrastructure was required.

But we found various excuses to explain why an early prototype could not be published.

After six months of pain, we finally finished the product. The effect was not good, but this was not a problem. The problem is that we finally realized that the excuses for not releasing the prototype earlier are all untenable.

Excuses we have come up

The good thing is that six months later, when yipit was upgraded to a website that aggregated daily group buying information, we learned to ignore various excuses and release the prototype product in just three days, quickly succeeded.

The following are the excuses we have used, and how we discover them is actually irrelevant.

It is not ideal.We believe that manual sending of discount information is not ideal. This is just speculation. No one knows the truth. As a result, there are many unsatisfactory versions that can be automatically sent after six months, despite the rich functions. We could have found out the cause of the defect six months ago and tried to solve the problem during this time, but at that time we were just wondering why the problem occurred and guessed it wrong.

We don't want to leave a bad impression on early adopters.I can say for sure that this is completely irrelevant, and the author does not mind this. After we re-released yipit as a group buying information aggregation website, we only received an email from the user complaining that we missed the sample sales. In fact, many early adopters are happy to see product improvements.

It also needs to add some features.We once thought that there must be a web version, people must specify the region in which they live, and the source address link of the discount information must be retained on the webpage ...... These ideas are all wrong, just our guesses. If the prototype was released within a week, we would soon realize that adding these features would not bring about any changes.

It takes several months to build the technical backend.We didn't need to build a backend. We can use mailchimp to send emails. During the next iteration of yipit, we did not build the backend. Users do not know what the technical backend looks like, so we should focus on improving the user experience.

The product must be able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of users.No, no. We don't have 100,000 million users, at least not in the short term. The question we should worry about is how to get the first 1000 users.

When someone else sees our idea, they will steal it.If our creativity has any strength, at least 10 other teams are working on the same thing. In fact, at that time, many other teams were doing the daily group buying information aggregation website, but we only published the website in just three days and became a pioneer, and won the most media attention.

Potential investors will see it.I'm not sure if even one investor noticed yipit at the time, but even seeing it is not a bad thing. Investors are willing to see the progress of your products and teams.

TechCrunch{! [Mailchimp, an email sending tool. -- Translator's note]}We will write articles to introduce us, but we are not prepared yet.They won't write. We spent a lot of time looking for people to write our stories, but they didn't. In addition, even if someone writes an article about our bad prototype, I'm sure it will be harmless for a long time. The reason why a startup company succeeds is that it has developed excellent products, not because of the outstanding PR work during the renewal period.

Excuse that I have not yet acknowledged

There is another excuse I haven't mentioned: I'm afraid that my startup will fail.

At that time, I had resigned. I told my family and friends about the idea. They all have confidence in me. What if that is not a good idea? What if I have to tell them that idea cannot be implemented? What if I have to admit defeat? You must fight against such thoughts. The best way I can think of is to take a startup company as an experiment, not an enterprise. In the early stage of the experiment, problems may occur. Your goal is to find out what went wrong and then iterate.

Last

If you can't find a good excuse (for example, if you do this, you will be in jail), release the early prototype. Don't delay release time is my best advice so far. I hope you can give us more advice than we did at the time.

This article is only used for learning and communication purposes and does not represent the idea of the Turing community. For non-commercial reprinting, please indicate the translator and source, and keep the original link of this article. From: http://www.ituring.com.cn/article/64386

Choose the wisdom of entrepreneurship: How do we deceive ourselves to postpone release (transfer)