Shipping product is one of the biggest validations a startup can accomplish – especially shipping the first product.
There’s a rule among sound technicians who run the sound systems for live music performances. If you can’t hear a certain instrument or singer, the first reaction should NOT be to turn it up, but to turn everything else down. As soon as you start turning stuff up, then you can;t hear other stuff and it needs to be turned up…and so on.
So it is with getting the product out of beta. The more you test the more you find wrong and the more you want to fix. Plus that time gives the engineers more time to release new features. Instead of “turning up” all the features that need to be fixed, think first about those your first customers could do without and perhaps turn them off until the next release.
A minimally viable product is about deciding what NOT to ship.
Read “Reality Check” by Guy Kawasaki
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