You're a start-up founder ready to change the world.
You wake up at 4:30 a.m. and sleep 4 hours daily, biohacking your way to speed and efficiency. You don't eat breakfast; you consume human fuel in liquid form—all the faster to guzzle down. You don't go for a run; you do optimized sprints between meetings—all the more efficient.
Why? You've got the product that will change the world, so you've got to get it to market first. The pressure's on, and you're working round the clock to get an MVP out there and soak up the acclaim.
Or do you?
What we're about to say might change your mind about your need for all that speed, and may even help you realize there is enough time to chew your food after all.
The key to a successful product launch isn't simply being the first to market. It's all about timing, and being second might mean you're more likely to stay in the running long term, learning from the mistakes of those who came before you.
The race to be first
But before we get into why silver is the new gold, let's understand why SaaS start-ups feel that crushing sense of urgency in the first place.
Like all things, the primary motivator often comes from those dollar signs. With investors on your back and the pressure to deliver, it's easy to see how SaaS start-ups, in particular, rush to market — the earlier you get something available for sale, the earlier you start to see that ROI, the more traction you build, and the more financially viable you seem.
But it's not just investors that ramp up the pressure. Often, it's your competition, too. Going to market first can cement an emerging brand as a market leader, and helps with increased customer acquisition as brands take their pick of keen users. All those early adopters mean a sea of data and information to exploit, offering a huge competitive advantage over the latecomers.
Yet rushing your launch may cause more harm than good. Launching too early can mean your minimal viable product isn't, well, viable, with frustrating bugs or closed-off functionality that annoy users and lose their trust. Alternatively, an early launch reveals your hand early in the game to your competitors, giving them the edge they might need in their own R&D.
A better strategy: Become a Fast Follower
The good news? There is a better way.
While there's no such thing as 'slow and steady' in the fast-paced world of business, there is certainly no rush to take first place. Sure, speed rewards you with the novelty factor, but the past has proven that the real winners over the long term are often those that come later.
This is known as the Fast Follower phenomenon, the idea that those who enter the market second can avoid the mistakes of the First Movers and engage a customer community that is already familiar with the product (and who might be frustrated from using the first iteration).
In the world of the Fast Followers, start-ups can learn, adapt, and overcome, even as they claim the advantages of being an early adopter.
This First Follower approach is not a new idea, and many of the biggest names in tech weren't the first players on the scene—although they certainly got in early.
Take Facebook, for example, which came after those almost forgotten pioneers in social networking: Friendster, LiveJournal, and MySpace. In fact, when Facebook first launched, spearheaded by a rowdy group of college kids, no one could have predicted its astronomical success over MySpace, which had deep corporate pockets and millions of regular users.
But while MySpace stagnated, Facebook saw its opportunity. MySpace's new overlord, News Corp, settled on a corporate approach to growth, mired in PowerPoints and KPIs; Facebook recognized that a social network needs to be led by the market and learn from its predecessors' mistakes. By April 2008, Facebook was bigger than MySpace and just kept getting bigger.
Facebook's timing was everything. They were given access to an audience of customers now familiar with social media, plus a list of technical and managerial failures to avoid, courtesy of the big wigs over at News Corp. And that meant that they were ready for the coming boom.
The importance of speed + quality
Of course, timing his launch to coincide with MySpace's downfall isn't the only thing Zuckerburg got right when he launched Facebook. If there's one thing Facebook does well, it's understanding that what their users want, they get.
Perhaps this is the true value of the Fast Follower strategy to launching a product. If you're not the first, then you're ready to see how your audience reacts to an innovative new thing. Then, with that information, you can pivot your product—and critically—your messaging.
This hits the two most overlooked aspects of a successful MVP launch:
- Delivering something that actually meets a market need,
- Explaining that market need through concise, clear messaging.
If you can't do those two things, your start-up won't be a success. It's that simple. But it's a lot easier to do both of those things when you already have customer data to analyze and understand.
Slow down there, cowboy
Okay, now wait. Doesn't this fly in the face of the much-renowned lean start-up approach, which tells you to launch early and often? Well, yes and no.
While many modern start-ups may prefer to launch fast then make changes based on customer feedback later, evidence suggests that this misses the real first step — understanding the kind of product the market wants in the first place. In other words, customer feedback should always be the first step in the launch cycle, not the third.
This is what happened to Triangulate — an online dating algorithm that purported to give users dates by analyzing their online footprint, then matching them up with a suitable partner. They launched in 2010 and quickly gained 30,000 users and closed a $750,000 seed round from a big Silicon Valley VC firm. Things were looking good.
So, what went wrong? The trouble Triangulate ran into was not necessarily with their algorithm, which worked. It was proving that the algorithm gave better results than when users found matches themselves. Triangulate hadn't accurately found a customer need, and then they were unable to demonstrate how their product met that need. As a result, the novelty quickly wore off for daters, and future iterations of their product fell flat.
Triangulate didn't test the waters first. They rushed to launch without adequately appraising their MVP against a market need, and based crucial decisions on unproven assumptions in their haste to be industry disruptors.
The bottom line? They needed to slow down.
Conclusion
Our key takeaway? There's still time.
One of the things that make start-ups incredible is their passion and their excitement. But this fervor can also be an Achilles heel.
Start-up founders are big personalities with big ideas and a team of people behind them who wanted to see a product launch yesterday. We understand that. At Command AI, we've certainly experienced that crackle of energy around the product and that brain-occupying urgency that drives decisions. But there should always be room to breathe.
Timing a launch is challenging, but wanting to be the first to market should never be your sole motivation. Get the basics right. Double down on meeting that market need. Take time to research your messaging strategically.
Then, watch closely as your competition goes first.
