Product Launch Experience Before Starting Up
At tonight’s ATDC Entrepreneur’s Night, I had a lot of fun telling some stories of the highs and lows we’ve experienced over the last 6 years building AccelerEyes. During the Q/A portion of the talk, there were two related questions that have prompted tonight’s post:
- In hindsight, what would you have done differently?
- If you were to move fresh to Atlanta again (as I did back in 2004), what is the best way to get involved in a startup?
The answer to the first question is that we would have done a number of things differently. I’ve posted thoughts on several of those in previous posts (for example, here and here). Everything we would have done differently boils down to the fact that we started a business without any previous business experience. More concretely, we started a business without product launch experience.
The answer to the second question is that I would look for ways to get product launch experience prior to starting something on my own. The best way to do that is to join another startup.
Note, by product launch experience I mean more than the press release and launch party. I mean the customer discovery, building, launch, and iterative traction finding (marketing/sales/price tuning) that take place in the comprehensive launch process.
No amount of text book reading can compensate for the experience of actually experiencing the dynamics of building, launching, and growing a new product. There is so much to learn about that process and much of that knowledge is generically transferable to other product launches.
If you do not have previous product launches, you will stumble a lot as we did. If you have experience, you will stumble less. You can get experience working for other startups or working in the right roles at big companies.
The best way to get that experience is to do startups while young. High school students and undergraduates can get that experience. People like David Cummings got a big jump on startup life by having those experiences at a young age (for example, here and here).
What are your thoughts on recommending product launch experience before starting a company?