I don’t pretend to know everything about startups, but I’ve gone from a series of failed ones where I’d waste 6 months and many thousands of dollars building something nobody wanted to finally generating enough revenue to go full-time, and wanted to share the advice that helped me make the change. I'm currently making about $30k per month across my 2 main projects, and honestly don't think I could have done either of them without making this change.

The number one mistake I made, over and over again, was prioritizing building over selling. Take it from someone who’s wasted months “perfecting” my product before actually showing it to customers. You almost always need to launch before you think you’re ready.

This is especially true if you're like me and subconsciously avoid rejection.

Beyond just the time, I spent just over $100k in development and product costs across only the projects that didn’t work out. Even if you’re building your product yourself, the number one piece of advice I can give is to validate your product before you build it, by talking (and ideally selling) to actual customers.

Why You Need to Launch Before You Build

When you’re at the “idea stage” of a startup/new business, there’s essentially 3 possible cases:

1. The problem you’re solving doesn’t exist, already has a better solution, or your idea is somehow unsalvageable: If this is the case, it’s a hell of a lot better to find it out quickly than to waste 6 months of your life building something and then make the realization.
2. You’re onto something, but your idea isn’t perfect: Shocking, I know. But seriously, this is the overwhelming majority of cases. If you’ve identified a real problem people have, it’s almost certain your solution isn’t perfect at first. In that case, selling to real people and getting their feedback through rejections, advice, whatever is invaluable in getting you closer to the right track.
3. You’ve magically stumbled upon the perfect idea from the start: even in this case, there’s no downside to selling before you build. If this is the case, the only way to know it is to actually sell it to real customers.

In all of those cases, it’s best to launch before you build the “full” product. Barring things like deep-tech or the next SpaceX, you should always validate interest before you spend months developing your product.

So how do you actually go about selling or launching before you build? I don't mean taking money from clients for things you don’t have. Here's a few concrete tips I've learned launching both SaaS and ecommerce businesses.

Concrete Tips/Strategies for Launching and Getting Customer Responses Quickly

1. Make a quick landing page before you build the product.

This is probably the bare minimum for a “launch.” You can literally start with a short description of your planned features/product and an email form. Obviously this can cost money, but I’d argue it’s necessary for any product you plan to sell on the internet.

If you aren’t experienced with web dev, just use a free site builder with a nice enough template and ability to edit. The name of the game here is speed.

I like Framer because it’s easy to use ideal for building attractive sites quickly, which is key when you need to validate your idea quickly. Other good options are WordPress**.org** (which is open source) or whatever platform you’re already familiar with that will let you get something nice up quickly.

Obviously, a nicer site is never a bad thing. But keep in mind the time that you’re spending tweaking things on your site that could be spent selling. To start with, choose a simple free template that fits what you’re selling and add product images/screenshots of your product. Here’s the one I use for SaaS/software products I’m trying to gauge the response for: https://www.framer.com/templates/moneywise/

2. Make use of IndieHackers, ProductHunt and similar sites to promote your product/landing page.

They’re all free, and ideal ways to start getting feedback and engagement with your actual product. You will almost certainly get some negative feedback, but that is often the most valuable kind at this stage.

Hell, even Reddit has a community for almost any interest. Start engaging with your target customers on these sites and as soon as your site is live start sharing it wherever you find a relevant community.

3. For ecommerce, consider PPC and other ads.

When I started out I would literally try to rank my product site on Google with SEO, which took months of time in which I didn’t know whether there was even willingness to pay for what I was selling.

Google and Bing (I know…) both offer pretty generous signup offers for ad credits. If you plan to reach customers on search/ads in the future, test it out now. This will help you gauge how large your market is, and how customers respond to your pricing offer. If you’re more advanced, you can even do stuff like A/B testing for the price and copy.

Paid ads are less ideal for SaaS/”innovative” products where you need more in-depth customer feedback, but for ecommerce it’s an extremely fast way of doing some initial validation of your product pricing.

Reddit ads gave me mixed results but currently has a completely free $100 credit that’s worth trying.

4. With caution, consider actually selling before you build.

Interest and positive feedback from potential customers is good, but the ideal way to truly validate your idea is to actually make a sale, at the real price that will make your idea profitable. Depending on the industry, you can do this in a few ways.

For example, if you’re looking at an ecommerce business where you want to validate interest at a certain price point, you can even have a full checkout and immediately refund purchases due to being “out of stock.” That way you’re validating their actual willingness to pay for your product without needing to spend months setting up the perfect logistics/software/whatever else you need.

5. When you do need to build the actual product, keep it simple and don’t be afraid to use hacky solutions.

Workflow automation tools like Zapier and Pipedream can do a lot, and it’s much better to get a hacky product out faster than spend months building something your customers don’t want. Hell, even Google Sheets a form on your site can go a long way.

I haven’t used them myself, but there are also no-code building tools like Bubble that are probably more than enough for most of the product/services you’re looking to build.

Exactly how to approach this is more product specific, but the principle is simple. Your MVP doesn’t need to (and arguably shouldn’t) be built perfectly for scaling to 1000x or even 10x your current users.

If you’re skeptical of just how bare bones successful startup “launches” can be, Y Combinator, arguably the most successful startup incubator out there, calls this “doing things that don’t scale,” and has a bunch of great examples (http://paulgraham.com/ds.html) of how companies like AirBnB started with extremely limited functionality.

6. Keep track of your goals, and keep them limited.

Wherever you are in the process, you want to be conscious of what you need to do and by when. This helps avoid things like feature creep, where you end up building way more than what you actually needed to launch, as well as generally keeping you on task.

I recommend organizing your goals into weekly sprints to start. In most cases (not all), if your MVP takes more than a few weeks to put together, it’s overly ambitious. I've found committing to a fixed date by which I have to start promoting/selling the product, whether on ProductHunt, direct email outreach, LinkedIn, etc. I avoid the temptation to continually "improve" the product while really just avoiding the (necessary!) risk of rejection.

Additional Links:

Credit where credit is due, most of the ideas in here are from YC's extremely helpful Startup School video series, Paul Graham's essays, with a little more specific advice from my own experience. If you're interested in reading more, I'd recommend:

http://paulgraham.com/ds.html (Do Things That Don't Scale by Paul Graham)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRZ_l7cVzzU&pp=ygUPeWNvbWJpbmF0b3IgbXZw (How to Build an MVP by Michael Seibel)

I'm not going to link to my blog here but please let me know if you found this helpful, or have any questions I didn't cover, thoughts, or anything else! I'm working on a series of posts on what I've learned from my ventures so far and would love to hear your guys' thoughts!

TL;DR: You should almost certainly launch before you build the actual product, or at least before you think it's ready. A simple landing page and an email list are free and will go a whole lot further in validating/improving your idea than obsessing over the perfect product before you actually sell to customers. With very few exceptions, almost every product can and should be sold to your target customers before you actually build it.