Forbes
The Pros And Cons Of Building Your First Startup Product In The Open
By: Abdo Riani
Most unsuccessful new innovative businesses fail because they build a solution that the market doesn’t need. Because of this, one of the biggest mistakes you can make as a new startup founder is to spend a lot of time and resources on building your product without taking feedback from the market. This way, you increase the chance that you are building a product that is likely to fail, and at the same time increase the amount of capital that you are risking.
The first order of business for every startup founder is to validate their idea even before starting to build a solution.
However, the solution validation process is not a one-time mission that ends with one outcome. Customer feedback is an ongoing process. Even after validating the idea, you are likely to make mistakes while building the product. This means that you need to continue talking to your customers while you build the first version of your product, the so-called MVP - minimum viable product.
The customers would serve as a reality check for each decision you make during the building process: which features are the most used, which ones are the most requested, what are people ready to pay for and what they aren’t, etc.
While this seems logical, there is a reason many entrepreneurs are intuitively very reluctant to show their work-in-progress to other people, especially to the wide public. Your reputation as a professional and specialist is connected to what you build, so your instinct would be to keep your work behind curtains until you are certain that your first product version is flawless.
This instinct, however, could be very counter-productive in the realm of startups. Product perfection is worthless with product uselessness. In fact, many of your customers will not mind using a mediocre solution as long as it solves their problem.
Involving your users in the process of developing your product is simply non-negotiable if you want to increase your chances of success. That said, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to fully forego an official product launch in favor of involving your customers in the process.
A good compromise is to work on a closed alpha and beta version. This could give you the best of both worlds. First, the simple fact that you are able to find customers willing to be involved in the beta (ideally committed financially) is a good sign that your idea actually solves a real problem. Second, people are aware that they are involved in an unfinished product, which means they would be more forgiving of any flaws and will work with you on building a better solution over time.
Going through this process will allow you to validate the need for a solution and progressively the effectiveness of your product in solving the problem which would decrease the risk of building something the market doesn’t need. At the same time, it will allow you to officially launch a relatively polished version to the public, which would increase the chance of people recommending your product to their peers.
Building In The Open:
Pros: Serves as a reality check for founders and keeps them laser-focused on the actual needs and wants of their customers. This drastically decreases the chance of wasting a lot of time, effort, and resources on building something that the market doesn’t need.
Cons: Requires the founder to ignore their ego and to show people a badly-working and possibly bad-looking version of their idea. Moreover, it makes it more difficult to build hype around an official launch event.
Building Behind Closed Doors:
Pros: Allows you to introduce a highly-polished first product version to the market, which could help you market a meaningful launch event and amplify early-stage growth through word of mouth (and ideally media coverage).
Cons: Not involving the customers in the process of building the solution increases a great deal the chance that your offering is not finely tuned to their exact wants and needs.
