Blog homeLets say you are launching a new website - or functionality on an existing website. There are three approaches to the timing and extent of your first release:
- Early - without all features present - so you can get a feel whether this is functionality that a user wants or whether there is demand for this service (Everything that is there has to work though).
- Late - with all completed before you launch.
- When the project plan says to launch (with as much functionality completed as possible).
With my own projects I have tended towards “Early” and for client projects towards “what the plan says”.
An advantage of the ”early” approach is that if you need to make changes to the technology or the design you can do this without having spent to much effort “up front”. In the past I have created websites with just a few web pages - not connected to any content management system or ecommerce platform - and put them live, thrown some web advertising at it for an hour, and seen whether it is a product that customers would understand and would buy online…… I might write about these kind of experiments another time. This is the extreme end of “early” release.
An advantage of the “late” approach is that you may, especially if you are launching a new concept that others are not doing, launch with such a significant foundation of technology that it would be impossible for a competitor to catch up as it would be “too much” to do. This may give you the advantage you need in order to give you enough time to build a userbase - before any competitors come into the same space (or add the same functionality to their site). If your product, like travel, is seasonal - then you could get “a season” ahead of a competitor. The disadvantage is that you have to be clear up front what problem you are looking to solve - and what the market needs - which is notoriously difficult when launching a new service - or new functionality (as opposed to relaunching existing functionality or website)
Last week at FOWA (Future of Web Apps conference, London) I listened to Dick Costolo, the former (before selling to The Google) CEO of FeedBurner, the RSS web statistics provider. He suggested a solution that is neither early nor late - but takes the best of both ideas.
Dick told the story of the FeedBurner launch. They took 5 months between starting development and their first public release. When they launched their first service (which was basic RSS feed subscriber statistics) there was some public comment that went along the lines of “I could have built this in a weekend” or similar. Dick says that indeed they could have. However, behind the scenes, FeedBurner had built significant foundations that were required for FeedBurner’s future plans. Over the following months they kept on rolling out new functionality and iterations very quickly - and much faster than competitors - because of these foundations. This gave them a competitive advantage - which was enough to see off any competitors in the long run.
Therefore FeedBurner had actually launched “late”, but with what looked like an “early” launch (with just simple public facing functionality)…..they could then react to market and user demands very quickly indeed….. the rest, as they say, is history.
Mind you, others at FOWA, such as Rashmi Sinha, founder of SlideShare, still was pushing the concept of “go early” and see what happens. Overall I think I still favour going early, but Dick Costolo has certainly ensured that for my future projects this will be on the list of topics that will need some internal discussion and attention.
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