When to open your startup to the public?

More than five years ago in New York, I met a group of guys who opened their first company and tried to bring the product to the market. They were enthusiastic and ideas, it seemed that their energy and perseverance would allow them to start earning millions in a short time. Every time we saw each other, they eagerly discussed updates for the site and could sit at computers for hours, distracted only by food and the restroom. However, their dreams about the project did not come true. They wanted to make the perfect product and pulled it open to the public.

Over the next years, I watched various startups and stages of their development. In the end, I realized one thing that many entrepreneurs should understand: “There is no such thing as a“ bad ”or“ perfect ”product.” There are not necessary and not actual products on the one hand, and there are products ready for opening to the public. The question is how to determine if my product is ready to be shown or not?

We must begin with the fact that no product can be perfect. That is why companies giants like Facebook or Google are constantly improving and complementing their services. Inevitably, mistakes and “holes” occur in the code of Internet companies, which are often detected only by guests of the site or after contests for hacking a site. They grow and develop, no matter what.
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I realized that I can open my project and start promotion even before the start of its implementation. As soon as you have an idea, you can choose a working title for the company and start asking friends, colleagues and competent people for opinions about your product. Yes, I perfectly see your upcoming question: “What if my idea is new and no one else does this? I do not want to be stolen! ” Do not worry, 90% of all ideas arising from entrepreneurs are ideas already implemented by some companies in one form or another, and they have no novelty. Just look at your direct and indirect competitors better, and I am sure you will find "traces" of your product. The remaining 10% are truly innovators who know how to notice the need for a particular product and start working on it. But in this case, you can talk about your product, without focusing on the key idea.

Of course, you can disagree with me, pointing out that it is better to produce a high-quality product than to show something “raw”. Let me argue and remember about Windows products. The first version was released in 1985, and the first popular - in 1995. How high were these products? There were a lot of mistakes and deficiencies. But every year the company tried to produce an increasingly high-quality and user-friendly product. There have not always been successes with the development, but, nevertheless, they successfully compete and occupy a dominant position.

Start promoting your startup from the moment you write the first lines of code. Open groups on social networks, keep a regular and corporate blog, write articles and in parallel develop the project. There will come a point in time when you will receive the first reviews of your product. Literally every day I get feedback and error messages in my project from random users. This allows you to quickly change the quality of service and gradually improve the product.

In addition to the above, I can assure you that by the time you launch a working prototype of the product, you will have the first customers and buyers. You can talk about your startup investor, showing reviews and the number of users, which will undoubtedly be a big plus.

In the process of working with first customers and reviews, you will understand how to conduct advertising campaigns and who is your potential customer. For all the time you change the quality and implementation of the idea several times, but in the end it will be worth it.

With this article I want to say that you should not be afraid and bring your product to “absolute perfection”.

In general, this is purely my opinion, which appeared in the process of work. I will be glad to hear your comments and development stories.