Eric Friedman – Marketing.fm

Last week I hosted a group of NYC entrepreneurs who came out to hear from Steve Blank. It was a great event and I am working on getting the video online.

During the night Steve asked the audience a great question; “when did Google launch?”

It was met with blank stares as nobody really knew the answer.

The answer is that they never officially “launched”. Sure they opened up the product to a larger sample, but from the first index of sites, to the next 100,000, to the next 1,000,000 then just kept having people use the product. They outgrew their servers and office space and continued to grow the product. They iterated along the way and used the crawling of the web as a catalyst for growth and adding new hardware.

This has resonated with me and gives an important lesson; never launch, just iterate.

By launching you are setting yourself up for the inevitable drop off in users, interest, and clicks happening at your site. Yes, you can have a press cycle and let folks know at the same time what you are up to, but I believe that having a fixed date can be a detractor from your core mission.

By putting things out there in current form, iterating on feedback, putting the next product out there, then iterating again – puts you in a unique position of always having people using your product.

Although this may not work for everything, I think web services provide the perfect playground to see this in action. I see companies that line up press, users, bloggers, and hope the stars align for their “launch day” whereas they should be concentrating on a useful user experience.

Having an alpha, beta, or early access program (as Steve likes to call it) is great – but having your product being used is the important step.

So launch today, iterate tomorrow, and never have a reason why somebody new can’t get on the system right now.