How to ship fast and create a customer feedback loop that grows your startup
How to ship fast and create a customer feedback loop that grows your startup
Hey everybody, welcome back to another week of the Product Market Fit Newsletter🚀🚀
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This week on The Founder Toolbox:
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Ongoing! The Closed Network - Best european Early Stage Investors by reputation
So, this newsletter is going to be a little shorter than usual, my calendar got completely full and I can’t dedicate as many hours as usual on the NL.
Nevertherless, I’m going to share 1 principle thay I find is the difference between great startups and all the rest: shipping fast + communication with your customers.
DISCLAIMER: I’m following this same principle with this Newsletter. I could just not publish anything this week because some excuse like, I didn’t have time enough, it’s not good enough, etc.
" Mere rate of shipping new features is a surprisingly accurate predictor of startup success.
In this domain, at least, slowness is way more likely to be due to inability than prudence. "
Paul Graham
1. Ship fast
Shipping fast allows the startup to improve the product at a faster rate (obviously) because it creates a sense of urgency that allows to:
Prioritize better
Because you are always short on time you only do what’s most important
Eliminate bullshit features
Or things that don’t add value to customers: again, not having the time to do everything perfect will push you to focus on the most important features and eliminate the noise
Create a company culture of high performance
It’s very hard to change speeds of a company that is already one way. Culture is one of the most important factors in any organization so, creating a culture of fast moving will make your startup way more competitive.
🚨 Shipping fast does not justify releasing a really bad product.
2. Communcate with your customers
Communication with your customers/users is as important as shipping fast.
I feel this is where many many startups fail.
You need to understand your customers' needs and their feelings for your product recurrently.
Shipping fast allows you to have an excuse to “talk to them” on a recurrent base.
You get them excited with new features, knowledge, others and you see which features have more impact when you release them.
This allows you to create the customer feedback loop and boom, you only need to keep going until your company gets bigger.
🚨 Make sure that the features you share and communicate do excite your customers and are important to them.
I see many founders that want to build x feature because they like it and it really doesn’t do anything for their customers. This is absolutely a waste of time.
Finally, use common sense, your customers don’t know what they want
So, you need to read between the lines. If your product is very bad your customers might not say it to you. You have to decide where you want to take your product to, not your customers.
Now, super valuable interview you must watch: