Paul Graham contrasts risks of launching early versus late and presents his rule of thumb: "launch as soon as you have a 'quantum of utility'" — meaning release once at least one person can do something with the product they couldn't before. He argues even a small group of excited users (e.g., 10 people) is sufficient justification to launch.
Chapters
Okay, so the risk of launching early is not as great as the risk of launching late. It's not like there's only risk on one side. Right. There's a risk of launching late, too. So you got to have a rule of thumb about when to launch. And my rule of thumb, I have this phrase for it that didn't become as sticky as minimum viable product, because it describes what the minimum viable product has. Launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which. Which means as soon as there's one person in the world who is glad that you launched, because now they can do something that they couldn't do. If you have something that if you launched it, no one would be happy, then you're not ready to launch. Right. As soon as there's at least somebody out there who would say, oh, here's this thing I can use because I can do X, and before that I couldn't do it, then you should launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility. If there's 10 people who are super excited, totally, totally launch, and nobody else cares, that is perfectly fine. That's great.