My first product launch was a disaster. I had spent the better part of a year building smpl with my two cofounders; our MVP worked great, we were using it to manage our own business, and on launch day... crickets.
Thousands of lines of code, months of effort, and a beautiful marketing site. We had decided to keep smpl a secret _until it [was] ✌🏾ready✌🏾.
Our critical launch mistake: nobody knew the damn product existed!
In the end, smpl was a success story, but it was a success story that could have had a dramatically different trajectory.
Trust is the hardest thing to build
When you're starting a new product or company, drumming up interest with an audience of potential customers is a critical ingredient to success. When it works, it starts with authenticity; by showing up in the places where your customers are, and becoming a trusted voice in the community.
Bar none, the single most common reason for a fumbled launch is a failure to earn the trust of the people who are supposed to use your product.
There are no shortcuts to earning trust. As a founder and a builder, this comes down to signal - how are you substantively showing the world that you care about the product space, that you've built a product worth using, and even more importantly -- one that's worth paying for?
Listen first, then build
The first part of building your signal is simple: immerse yourself in the world of the people you want to serve. Listen to them, empathize with their problems, and become an enthusiastic part of their community.
Go where your audience is: if they're on reddit, join the subreddit. Subscribe to relevant creators on YouTube and TikTok, and watch as many of their videos as you can. Get the newsletters, read the books, go to meetups. Do whatever you can to be a part of the community.
In the earliest stages of product development, you should be listening more than anything. Ask questions, and listen to the answers, and decide on a product direction based on what you're observing, not on what you thought you knew all along.
Perhaps most importantly: becoming a regular in the places where you're building your market is how you become trusted by the community. It is really difficult to just show up and start selling; you have to be a part of the community first.
Ship early, ship ugly
Once you're building, ship often, and share updates with your target audience. Don't get hung up on perfection here -- share what's new and what's working well as well as the things that aren't working.
It's okay to be wrong - and probably a good thing at this stage. Features that hit the cutting room floor are ones that you can learn from, and your customers will appreciate your honesty.
Because you did your homework in the first step, you should already know where your audience goes to talk about your niche. That's great news! Share your work there, with vulnerability and honesty.
You'd be surprised how much value you can get from sharing your work in this way. Something along the lines of "Hey, I just built this tool because I was frustrated with XYZ. Does anyone else find this useful?" can be a great way to get the ball rolling. This is a great time to offer free access to your product, and get feedback from die-hards in your target audience.
The big reveal is the path to failure
Let's all say it together: Nobody wants The Big Reveal™️. Keeping your work secret is a surefire way to launch a product that nobody wants to an empty room.
Authenticity and the trust economy
You'll do best when the work you share comes from your heart - and not from a hastily written ChatGPT prompt. That's not to say that you should never use LLMs to help you communicate, but people will be able to tell when they're being generated-at rather than spoken-to.
These signals are getting more difficult to spot; trust is harder to earn in a world where people can fake the signs of passion and success. You've probably seen headlines recently about Soham Parekh, a talented engineer who has been working for multiple startups at the same time.
It takes less effort than ever for someone to appear productive, successful, and visionary. Everything is getting wrapped in a glossy layer of AI-powered "productivity"; work is being churned out of LLMs at a pace that's hard to keep up with.
What you can't fake is results, authenticity, and the ability to deliver. Show up and be human, and you'll find the right people to build for.
Prove that your work can be trusted
The most fundamentally helpful thing you can do is build a product that has real value. All of the steps you've taken to this point should help here: you've embedded yourself with your audience, built a product that you've gone super deep on, and shown the world that you can deliver.
Now you've got to keep the momentum going. Product development is a marathon, and when done right, it's also a virtuous cycle.
Each iteration of your work should make the product a little more refined, and more valuable to your target audience.
My favorite book for audience building
Not sponsored, I'm just a bit of an Arvid Kahl stan: His book The Embedded Entrepreneur is a must-read for anyone who's trying to build a product.
It fundamentally changed the way I think about building products. Don't miss it.
