How to Launch Quickly

How to launch a startup quickly in five steps:

1. Talk to a set of users to gain an understanding of their highest-order problem, focus on this when building your Minimum Viable Product and ignore their other problems until later.

2. Build a lean Minimum Viable Product fast; this should be ridiculously simple and only take a few weeks. Spending time on a pitch deck is not as valuable as building something of value that you can give to users.

3. Launch your lean Minimum Viable Product quickly even if it is bad or has limited functionality, this way, you can get some initial users interacting with it. If your startup is harder to launch, this can be as simple as a landing page that explains what you do.

4. Talk to your initial users for feedback and see if you have built something they want. Make sure that you are very flexible – hold the problem you are solving and your customers tightly, but hold the solution you are building loosely.

5. Iterate, continue to improve the solution until it actually solves the users’ problem.

Above all, don’t fall in love with your Minimum Viable Product or the idea in your head. Launching is just a starting point to iterate from.