Did you know that a guy was able to launch a successful startup in seven days? No, seriously he did. His name is Dan Norris and he is the founder of WP Curve. A startup dedicated to providing global WordPress assistance on demand. Today, it earns millions of dollars in revenue.
But WP Curve isn’t Norris’s first startup. Norris has started many businesses and failed a few of them. He previously owned a creative agency until he became burned out and realized that he wasn’t making any revenue. He still had a burning desire to become a successful entrepreneur. So he decided that with his limited resources he was going give himself a week to build a successful startup. It worked.
One of the reasons that he gave himself such limited time is because he realized that for a business idea to be truly validated it must be launched and exposed to others. Having such a small production date caused him to be proactive and collect useful feedback days later to improve the product.
I call these kinds of launches, Quick Product Launches. I call them that because most people take weeks, months, and years to create their first product. A seven day launch seems crazy to a lot of people but it can be extended to 30 days if needed. Either way the main objective of these launches is to motivate entrepreneurs to produce a product out in the world so they can learn from its results.
The Benefits of Starting Quick
Product launches separate serious entrepreneurs from the “wantrepreneurs”. Norris explains that a wantrepreneur is a person that spends their time learning about entrepreneurship instead of practicing it. They usually spend money on books and courses on how they can run a business but yet have not even started their own. Entrepreneurs are different from wantrepreneurs because they learn strategies on how to build a business while actually implementing it. They are the perfect people for quick product launches.
A quick product launch gives you quick feedback on what is working and not working. Like I said before, you don’t learn until you launch. Want to know if your target market will buy your product? Launch! After your launch, your sales becomes a metric to determine if the product is sustainable or not.
You can also question the people who did and did not buy your product. Ask them what they like or did not like about it. You can than edit your product based on their feedback to create a much better product in the future.
The Stresses of Starting Quick
Quick product launches seems like a fun idea but it can be pretty stressful to implement. Thirty days to create and launch a product can even scare the more experienced entrepreneur. How do you think a seven day challenge would feel like?!
Product newbies tend to think that they need to create a large, time consuming product for their first launch. They are just making the process really hard for themselves. They need to focus on building smaller things like a 20 page eBook, an email course, or a simple video course.
A lot of aspiring entrepreneurs are really hesitant about producing a product because it forces them to challenge themselves. It’s especially scary for wantrepreneurs because they are pushed out of their comfort zone. They expose themselves to the possibility of failure. There’s a tendency to delay launches or stop them completely because of having to deal with the reality that maybe some people are not ready to build their own business.
Should You Start a Quick Launch?
Even though taking part in a quick product launch can make a lot of creators nervous (or frustrated) it allows them to determine the path that they want their business to go. Building low-risk products over a small period of time gives them greater feedback with less time and resources.
If you want to grow out of the wantrepreneur shadow to become a real entrepreneur you must understand that in order for your business to grow you must create a product that is well received by your target customers. You don’t learn until you launch!
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