Do I launch my product or do I develop it further?

As a start-up you will eventually end up in a situation where you have to make a choice; do you spend your last money on improving the product, or do you spend it on launching your product and marketing it? Most marketers will tell you that you should always have a perfect product (you see the “product” is one of the four P’s in marketing). But I disagree.

Imagine that you have $1000, but you are afraid it will get stolen, the only way to avoid this, it seems, is to buy a safe. Unfortunately the safe cost $1000. Would you buy the safe? The same concept applies here, do you make a fantastic product that no one will hear about or do you make a mediocre product that many hear about? I would chose the latter and then use the money I make to improve the product later. This will grow your company quicker. And let’s face it, you have no idea what the consumer want in a product anyway. Just face it.

This is of course assuming this is a new product to some extent, you probably don’t know what people want, even if you think you do. Edison started rolling out electricity at an alarming rate, the killer application, was of course electric light. This meant that when people first got electricity, the outlet was a socket that matched the light bulb, not the socket we know today. Little did Edison know that washing machines and electrical irons would come along and that a socket where you had to screw in the cord would become dangerous. Everything, as we know now, worked out well for Edison, but he had no idea what electricity was going to be, or how big it was going to be. Start rolling out your product, make money and adapt your product to the feedback you get, who knows, maybe the technical improvement you have in mind isn’t what you should improve at all?

I also talked to a former product developer at Phillips once, he now runs his own company. He explained that Phillips, and the other big ones, never launch with their best product. Launch with your number two, price it in the stars, and then when your sales decline, introduce the next generation at the same price and lower the price of the last generation. And never launch a new generation until the next is in a drawer somewhere ready to launch

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