If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. – Reid Hoffman
At Sprint.ly, we’re all about shipping code. Our entire goal with Sprint.ly is to help companies ship more code and to include more people in the product creation process. While we’re proud to have launched we are also extremely excited to push out all of the features we have in the pipeline.
We wanted to talk about a few things we learned from launching Sprint.ly in the hopes that it’ll help others out there who are anxiously awaiting their own embarrassing 1.0. Overall, things went really smoothly, we think. The following are some thoughts on what we did wrong and a thing or two that turned out great.
- We intentionally launched at 7pm on a Saturday to keep things quiet and easy going (after all, we are a team of just two). This meant that we didn’t have to worry about a surge in traffic to our servers or our support queues. Additionally, we decided to start off with Sprint.ly being invitation only and to require payment information up-front as a way to lower our support costs and help us focus on improving the product.
- We spent very little time on the copywriting. Our thought was that we should do a quick video instead as we could say and show a lot more. Our lack of proper copywriting, however, led to some initial confusion about what our product was, how payment worked, what the free trial included, etc.
- Speaking of the video, we wrongly assumed that most people, like ourselves, would rather see the product in action. While this largely turned out to be true, there was a significant amount of people out there that wanted a static, screenshot-based product tour.
Overall, we’re happy with how things shook out. I mentioned Reid’s quote to a customer I was demoing Sprint.ly to and he said, “It’s a lot more done than you think.” It’s hard, as the person launching a product, to believe that, because your vision is always going to be so much bigger than your 1.0.
