The Agile Startup: Quick and Dirty Lessons Every Entrepreneur Should Know

Launch to Learn

The foundation of The Agile Startup is that you don’t have all of the answers; you have to get them from the market. You’ll have hunches as to what the right answers are, but these are dangerous assumptions, not facts. You could be solving problems that no one cares about. The best way to learn the truth and convert assumptions into facts is to launch your company. Create a minimally viable product (MVP) that has the smallest feature set required to land your first customers. Your vision and early customer interviews will help you design the first version of the product. Then you can get an actual product in front of customers and react to their feedback.

Your intuition will tell you that everything needs to be perfect, so launching quickly will probably feel very wrong (at first). But your MVP is only the first release and not the ultimate vision. You will keep building, expanding, and developing your product. But now with customers in tow, you can be sure that you’re solving real customer problems. Don’t wait—the only way to learn is to launch.

Previous | Chapter Contents | Next