MBA2059 How Good Does Your Product Need To Be Before Launch?

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Doll RMBA show Business insights and strategies you can use every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn how good does your product need to be before launch? Many of us spend a lot of time tinkering and working on our product before we start selling it. Whether it's a software, a course, a service, it doesn't really matter. Most businesses and most products have the luxury of iterating, meaning that when you put it out there in the world, you can come out with another version. You can improve it. You can get feedback from your customer so that you know you're moving in the right direction without sacrificing unnecessary money and time and effort. But the question that we're going to dive into in today's episode is how good does your product actually have to be? What's the bare minimum before you can start selling it? And that's what going to share with you today. I'm going to give you real life examples from real world businesses as well as big brands and businesses that you probably have heard of. I'm going to share with you some personal examples, examples from my own businesses of when I launched too late and the consequences of that and when I launched right in time and the impact it made on my business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I want to start today's episode by taking us all back to 2007. Steve Jobs and the Apple computer company was launching the first iPhone. Now, mind you, Apple was around as a company for over 30 years. They were building computers and ipods, laptops, a whole bunch of other products. They've had success in their business, right? But they were launching something totally new in a new marketplace. They were launching a phone prior to the iPhone. Most of the other competitors in the marketplace were not computer companies. They were phone companies like Motorola and BlackBerry and Nokia. If some of these names are unfamiliar with you, then you're much younger than I am. But you can Google and I'm here to tell you that when the iPhone was launched, the first iPhone in 2007, as big of an impact it made on the world today, and our iPhones today are incredible machines, the first iPhone really sucked. It actually was not a great product. It was actually a really bad phone. It had horrible reception. You could barely hear people on a phone call from the speaker. The glass on the phone shattered easily. If you wanted to get an iPhone, you couldn't get it on your own carrier. You only had to go with one carrier. Want to go with a different carrier? Sorry, tough luck. You got to switch to this carrier, it had horrible battery life. It didn't have an app store. There was no way to download apps. It was just whatever apps that are on there. There was no 3G when other phones all had three. It was a totally new type of phone, meaning there was a huge type of learning curve that people had to have. There was no buttons. There was nothing for them to understand or read on the actual phone. People didn't even know how to carry the phone. Like, do I put it in my pocket? I know this sounds strange, but most phones back then had a, like a belt holster or there were small footphones that can just kind of fit in any pocket, unlike a big slab of glass. All in all, the iPhone was actually a pretty bad phone. I know I had one when it came out. Steve Jobs could have said, this phone is not good enough. It sucks in so many ways. We need to keep working on it, get it better and put it out when it's perfect, when it's flawless. No, they launched it anyway. They knew it was good enough to put it out there. They knew they needed to get feedback from their customers and iterate. And the same goes for you and your product. You need to launch your product not when it's perfect, but when it's good enough for your customers to want to buy it despite its flaws. Your product, your service, your course, your training won't be perfect. Just accept that now. But when you have customers that want it despite it not being perfect. Now you are talking. This tells you two things. One, it tells you that the problem you're solving is so strong that people are happy to look away or look aside from the problems that it might have. Number two, you are too close to the product, to the service. You might see these problems, but most people might not care. And as long as it does the job, the promise that the product or you make, then they're good. They got their money's worth. This is why whenever you create and launch a product, you need to define a singular goal. What promise are you making to your customers? What problem is your product really solving? And as long it does that and you fulfill on that promise, you are ready to launch. That's how you know you're ready. Let me give you an example. When I launched my clothing line back in the day, when Zenome Designs, my promise to the customer was, if you send me your measurements, I will custom tailor a shirt for you and send it back. That's the promise. Now, when I first launched, did I have overnight delivery or quick delivery? It took Two weeks for people to get their shirts? No, I didn't have quick delivery. Did I have a snazzy website? No, I had a basic website that allowed them to download a measurement form and upload it back to me via email. Right. They didn't even upload it on the site so that I can fulfill their order. Did I offer so many different styles and colors? No, but people bought the product because they really wanted to be able to custom tailor their dress shirts. They wanted a nice shirt for their wedding, they wanted a nice shirt for their job interview. I fulfilled the pain for them because it's hard for them to buy a really well fitted shirt in a department store because maybe they're tall or they're thin or they have long arms or a long neck or a large torso. You get the point. I solved their pain. Now all the other things around solving that pain are really. Details are really what improves the offering. But the promise was fulfilled and therefore I knew I was ready to launch. Let me give you an opposite example where I waited too long and launched well past after I was ready to launch. And what were the repercussions? What were some of the side effects of that? Before my software company, Webinar Ninja, I launched a course and guide called the DIY Webinar Guide. And it was a guide that showed people how to put together with different pieces of software, a webinar. I was doing that at the time before I created my own software and thought other people would want to know that. Now, instead of me just starting with a minimal viable product with just fulfilling the promise by showing people the first step in that process, by maybe just writing a blog post and seeing the response. Nicole and I went totally deep on this idea, thought, this is an incredible idea. Other people are going to want to do this. They want to understand how to do this. And we dedicated four months of our time and effort into creating this guide, creating the offer, the sales pages, the video tutorials that go with the sales video that goes with it, put it all together and the launch flopped. Because what we learned through the launch is that this is not what people really wanted. Now, if I just created an MVP like a blog post like I mentioned, talking about maybe the first few steps or talking about the concept in general and saw that maybe people liked this blog post. They commented it got more traffic than my other posts, it was shared on social. I would have known that people actually want to learn about this. What I found out the hard way, after all that sacrifice that people don't want to learn this, they want a tool to do it for them. And in that hard lesson and costly lesson, I learned that people actually want software, and that's how Webinar Ninja was born. But that's a really expensive lesson and I could have learned it easily by just testing a smaller version that solved that problem and launched with something very, very simple like a blog post. The problem or the trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is thinking that their idea is so brilliant and is such a fantastic solution that of course everybody's going to love it. You can't be the person that validates your business or your product. You can't be your only customer. You need to make sure your target audience really loves it and you want to make small bets and make some small wins when you're getting started, when you're launching. So don't invest so much in the beginning. Create something that just solves a problem, like I mentioned with your product or service and put it out there. Another example of doing this is instead of you investing months in building a full on course on a topic, sell a live workshop, a 90 minute, two hour workshop on the topic. See how well that sells. If people buy your 90 minute workshop, there's a good chance they'll buy your full course. But if they don't, you might need to get some feedback and tweak based on that so that you spend your time wisely. It's more important to work on the right things than to work hard. And of course, shameless plug. You can run a paid workshop using Webinar Ninja, our webinar software.

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Wrap up today's lesson. Get very clear about what problem you solve with your product, your service, your whatever. Make sure that you are solving that problem in a minimal viable fashion. What's the least amount of time and effort and money do you need to invest? Reevaluate that and make sure you put out there and you should feel a little bit hesitant. You might not be super proud of it because it's not perfectly designed or perfectly created or the vision in your head. But I'm here to tell you that vision in your head of the product is not version one. That's version 10. Put version one out so that you can iterate, improve, get feedback, and guess what? Make some money so you can fuel and fund your dream project, your dream product, your dream business. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you haven't subscribed, hit subscribe right now on whatever podcast software you use. So if you use Spotify or Stitcher Radio or Himalaya or Apple Podcasts, we're on all the platforms. Hit subscribe or follow. That way you don't miss an episode. Also, it gives you access to our entire feed of 2000 episodes. So go ahead and do that right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this Building a great product or business is a lot like walking through a maze. You gotta be patient, and you're not necessarily going to get out of the maze or get to the promised land. On your first go. You might hit a few dead ends, you might get lost a little bit. You'll get your bearings and eventually you'll find your way through the maze. You'll remember from past mistakes, and you'll apply what you learned to help you move forward. Failure is a rite of passage in business, so embrace it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Hey Fidelity Can I get a second.

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