Let’s Ban the Word “Launch”
NOVEMBER 23, 2016
Great press and the hype surrounding launches can feed an entrepreneur’s ego and even spark a temporary swell of excitement and energy into a company, but often at the expense of doing the hard, slow work of serving customers well.
Silicon Valley is obsessed with “launching” things.
Like ideas, launches are now cheap. Once upon a time, it meant something to launch a company or product, but today, when manifesting an idea costs about 10 bucks on Squarespace, the term has all but lost its value. Anyone can “launch” something.
We’ve all read about the guy that launched twelve start-ups in twelve months and the company that launched in thirty cities in six months. There’s no shortage of company launches, product launches, feature launches, or even regional launches.
The problem with our romanticization of launches is that it paints a distorted view of the launch stage for entrepreneurs.
Part of that distortion comes from today’s tech press, eager for a quick story that does little actual vetting of the technology.
For the press, it’s very much about the idea behind a start-up, but usually not about the actual business. Thus we get a slew of high profile “launches” for companies that never have a strong, valid path to monetization (e.g. making money), or worse yet, technologies that never materialize but sound cool on paper.
The problem with this distortion of launches is that press validation does not reflect customer validation, adoption, or retention.
Great press and the hype surrounding launches can feed an entrepreneur’s ego and even spark a temporary swell of excitement and energy into a company, but often at the expense of doing the hard, slow work of serving customers well.
The question entrepreneurs should be asking with a launch is the same question that should propel much of their company’s strategy—what is the problem and how are we going to solve it in a way that makes more money than it costs?
