This is an awesome post. Thank you for this. Thinking about a start-up as an experiment, not a business, until it succeeds is the biggest takeaway.
That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April.
None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.
These early launches are not expected to "stick" - either that, or I've just been terribly unlucky. The only value you need to extract is real-time feedback about what you got right and what you got wrong. Then you tweak it and launch again, and again, and again. And eventually, you reach "product-market fit." And then it sticks. If you're lucky.
But the early product is not expected to be scalable. It just helps you avoid the problem of launching a late product with all the same major flaws.
Just curious, what was it about alpha and beta that don't stick as opposed to now? Have you stuck some users in the mean time?
I also get stuck on the question of how many features is 'enough' that users won't immediately leave, which is when you can begin testing your business assumptions
That said, there is some truth to the fact that you need to love it before you can let others see it. It has to be clear to you why you yourself want to use it. We have gone out on many launches. Alpha, Beta, and now launching to the world on 17th April.
None of those early launches stuck! Why? Because it was still a Work-In-Progress. And it felt that way to our early users. It felt like we had to make excuses when presenting the product to friends and early adopters.