“I learned this lesson the hard way when I was running my first start-up, SocialNet. I didn’t want to be embarrassed by our first release, so the approach we took was to complete the entire product before we pulled back the curtain and let people sign up. This approach delayed SocialNet’s launch by a year, and when we finally did launch, we quickly realized that half of the features we’d painstakingly implemented weren’t important, and half of the important things that our service would be useless without were missing because we hadn’t thought of them. While there were other reasons why SocialNet failed, not launching early and iterating based on market feedback was probably the main cause of death.”