Scott Porad

The most dangerous pitfall for a startup is to waste resources–time, energy, and money–on things that don’t matter.  I mean “don’t matter” in a relative, not absolute sense.  In other words, spending resources on things that “don’t matter now“.

When I advise startups I return to this theme a lot.  And, there is one piece of advice that I find myself repeating over and over again: the absolute, number one most important thing is to launch.

Let me repeat that because I can’t emphasize it enough: strip out everything that is not absolutely 100% essential and get your product, feature or site in front of real users or customers.

Why?

In most cases, you are trying to create value with whatever you are launching.  It is impossible for that to occur if you haven’t launched.  Simply put, whatever you are trying to achieve cannot happen until you launch.  Period.  To share the wisdom of a former co-worker, “you gotta be in it to win it”.

Equally as important is that the only way can start learning about what works and what doesn’t is by having real customers use it.  You may think your users or customers want a widget or gidget or flex capacitor, but you just don’t know for certain.  Until you know for certain you’re putting your resources at risk.  The surest way to find out is to get your product in front of the users and learn.

At the end of the day, launching is the name of the game…focus on it like a laser beam and you will succeed.