Launch now

When is your product or service finished? When should you put it out on the

market? When is it safe to let people have it? Probably a lot sooner than you're

comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it out there.

Just because you've still got a list of things to do doesn't mean it's not done.

Don't hold everything else up because of a few leftovers. You can do them later.

And doing them later may mean doing them better, too.

Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks,

what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to focus. You

suddenly realize there's a lot of stuff you don't need. And what you do need

seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity. It's the best way

to get to that gut instinct that tells you, "We don't need this."

Put off anything you don't need for launch. Build the necessities now, worry

about the luxuries later. If you really think about it, there's a whole lot you don't

need on day one.

When we launched Basecamp, we didn't even have the ability to bill

customers! Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a

thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solve more

urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.

Camper, a brand of shoes, opened a store in San Francisco before construction

was even finished and called it a Walk in Progress. Customers could draw on the

walls of the empty store. Camper displayed shoes on cheap plywood laid over

dozens of shoe boxes. The most popular message written by customers on the

walls: "Keep the store just the way it is."

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Likewise, the founders of Crate and Barrel didn't wait to build fancy displays

when they opened their first store. They turned over the crates and barrels that

the merchandise came in and stacked products on top of them.+

Don't mistake this approach for skimping on quality, either. You still want to

make something great. This approach just recognizes that the best way to get

there is through iterations. Stop imagining what's going to work. Find out for

real.