When is the right time to launch?
This week, in my “Dozen Founder Blunders” post, I asserted that launching too early risks poor adoption, while delaying too long can forfeit market advantage. This post elaborates on that guidance.
Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, has a “Rule of Thumb”: "If you're not slightly embarrassed by your MVP, you launched too late."
In the age of AI, when speed matters more than ever, the best AI startups don’t wait for perfection; they launch, learn, and refine at an accelerated pace, leveraging user engagement to drive rapid innovation.
When is the right time to launch? There's no single answer—it depends on market readiness, product maturity, competition, and business preparedness. Use this framework to determine the ideal launch timing aligned with your product and core values:
Market Readiness: Assess market segment demand, customer urgency, and technological maturity. Look for early adopters and sub-segments, market signals, and features-as-solutions that reveal unmet needs. Ensure key technologies like AI, blockchain, or cloud computing are stable and widely adopted to support your product.
Product Maturity: A strong launch requires an MVP that solves a real problem, validated through a statistically significant number of customer tests (20-30 is the right number for B2B products) and user feedback. A clear UI and reliable functionality are essential—complex navigation, hard-to-find features, frequent crashes, or security flaws can erode trust and slow adoption.
Competitive Landscape: Successful launch timing balances market readiness and competition. Launching too early requires market education, while being too late risks losing customers to competitors. The sweet spot is fulfilling existing demand without a market without a dominant player, where clear differentiation is the key to standing out.
Business Readiness: A successful launch requires a clear go-to-market strategy, scalable infrastructure, and sufficient funding to support marketing, sales, and ongoing improvements.
Strategic Considerations: Investor, leadership and partnership alignment, well-prepared sales materials, leveraging industry cycles, major events, and budget periods for maximum impact all come into play.
Your "product moment"—not to be confused with Pearson's correlation coefficient—emerges from a combination of factors, guided by sound judgment. A founder's and startup CEO’s crucial role is to cut through the noise and identify the true signal.
My Advice: Trust Your Instincts
Gather insights from experts, analysts, mentors, and industry peers, but ultimately, trust your own judgment. External advice is invaluable as it provides diverse perspectives and uncovers blind spots, but no one understands your vision, product, and market as deeply as you do. Weigh the input carefully, but make decisions that align with your strategy, values, and long-term goals. At the end of the day, your intuition—shaped by experience, data, and deep market understanding—will guide you toward the right path.