My point (which is based on a relevant experience) is - don't release anything to the public unless you are certain it will get traction. If you want to validate the feature set or your market positioning, do a closed release.
A lot of people tend to underestimate the importance of the initial public release. It is a single, most important natural milestone in the lifetime of a product, so it needs to be handled with an utmost care.
Staying in a stealth mode and keeping your product and its idea confidential has multiple benefits. Most importantly, it allows you to build a competitive entry barrier, which in turn gives you time after the launch to scoop up users and establish yourself as a leader on your target market segment. Disclose your idea too early and you will tip off your competitors, so by the time you have it polished and working, it already gets replicated.
The "release-early, release-often" is an open source mantra, it rarely applies to the competitive start-up environment.
Hey Ive been there too and from my experience big splash entries like Techcrunch articles and the likes don't do as much as people think.
"don't release anything to the public unless you are certain it will get traction."
This is a distribution issue which is in my opinion is a entirely different feature set than the "product". While off topic I agree the only thing you should be focusing on is getting traction. In fact I would say throw the product out of the equation and only worry about traction. But this is a different argument and admittedly I'm an extremist in this area :)
Essentially we are saying the same thing except you think discoveries should be made in private to increase your popularity at launch while I think (ONLY if you can keep up) going public is more efficient for the successful evolution of your product.
I guess it comes down to how much data you need to interpret what the market wants. Personally I need tons.Maybe you are a better interpreter than I am :)
I am sure we can agree on something :)
My point (which is based on a relevant experience) is - don't release anything to the public unless you are certain it will get traction. If you want to validate the feature set or your market positioning, do a closed release.
A lot of people tend to underestimate the importance of the initial public release. It is a single, most important natural milestone in the lifetime of a product, so it needs to be handled with an utmost care.
Staying in a stealth mode and keeping your product and its idea confidential has multiple benefits. Most importantly, it allows you to build a competitive entry barrier, which in turn gives you time after the launch to scoop up users and establish yourself as a leader on your target market segment. Disclose your idea too early and you will tip off your competitors, so by the time you have it polished and working, it already gets replicated.
The "release-early, release-often" is an open source mantra, it rarely applies to the competitive start-up environment.