Former YC CEO Michael Seibel: “Launches aren’t special”

Now I want to talk about launching for a second because a lot of founders have this misconception about launching. They see big companies launch stuff and they assume that's what startups do. In fact, they see companies, they kind of think about like startups. Facebook's not really a startup anymore, but they see them getting a lot of press and getting a lot of buzz and yada yada yada. And they have in their head that that's what a successful company looks like when they launch. Well, let me ask you this question. How many here? Remember the day that Google launched? No. How about Facebook? Okay. How about Twitter? No. Great. So it turns out that launches aren't that special at all. Okay? So if you have this magical idea of your magical launch you want to do, throw it away, it's not that special. The number one thing that's really important is to get some customers. So to make people feel better, let's use different terms. How about launch is when you get any customers. And how about like press launch. Press launch. Really impressive is when like people write about things and it's all exciting and you get all this buzz. Let's push the press launch off and let's push the get any customers launch really, really soon. That's our goal here. It's a lot harder to learn from your customers when they don't have a product they can play with. You can talk to your customer all day, but you have no idea whether the thing you want to build can solve their problem. If you put the thing in front of them and it doesn't solve their problem, you know, right away. And so all the research in the world is good, but until you can put something in front of people, you have no friggin idea whether it's going to work. So spending all that time on a pitch deck is not as valuable as spending your time building anything that you can give to a customer.