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Steve Huffman explains why you should launch your product early

Name: Steve Huffman explains why you should launch your product early
Uploaded: 2023-12-15T17:30:01+00:00
Duration: 1 min 8 s
Channel: Lorenzo
Description: Steve Huffman wrote Reddit's first code in June 2005 and launched it three weeks later. He had no fixed vision, just launched fast and watched what users…

15 Dec 2023 · 1 min

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1:08

Steve Huffman wrote Reddit's first code in June 2005 and launched it three weeks later. He had no fixed vision, just launched fast and watched what users did. Only 25% of the features they added in the first six months survived, but launching early let them learn what actually worked.

Questions this video answers

June 3 or June 4, 2005.

June 22, 2005.

Paul Graham.

About 25%.

Alexis (his cofounder).

Chapters

We started, I think I wrote my first line of code on June 3rd or 4th, 2005, for Reddit and we launched on June 22nd. I didn't even launch it. Paul Graham linked to us from his blog without telling me, and from then it was on. And the good thing about that, for us in particular, is we didn't actually have a vision for Reddit, for better or for worse, which would affect us in a lot of different ways going forward. But as soon as we launched, that's when we started to find a path. And we just would follow the users every day as, what do we think is best for the users? What do we think is best for us? And just build towards that. And we built a lot of loyalty through those actions. And that would not have happened if we were sitting in our apartment not launching, because we launched. And then for the next six months, we just added a ton of new features, only about, probably 25% of which actually lasted more than a day or two. But there was stuff we thought was a great idea. We had these categories. I remember in July, at some point, I made Alexis, my co founder, stay up all night one night categorizing every link that had ever been submitted to Reddit, and the next morning I was like, we launched. I was like, it's not working. But we could have probably, if we had launched, we could have had that feature until November and then launched and then wondered why it didn't work.