Why Startup Founders Should Launch Companies Sooner Than They Think | Office Hours

Launching a company is often pictured as a big splashy event with lots of media attention and hype. This can be scary! It also often results in founders delaying their launches, which then stalls the crucial lessons they could be learning. In this episode, YC Partners discuss this common hesitation and why it can be harmful to the journey and growth of a startup.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's going on is that founders are just, they're embarrassed about the state of their own product. They've come from companies that have mature, polished products.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  And they compare their launch to like an Apple launch. If Apple fumbles a launch, the world's media is going to write about it. But if some small startup fumbles a launch, no one cares.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  We don't actually remember all the failed launches, but there are many, there are many. If you don't launch, you're being an idiot.

• 0:23Speaker 03

  If you're a first time founder, you're probably going to take way too long to launch. Today, we're sitting down with the YC partners who will talk about exactly that. What are you going to say to yourself that will lull you into that form of slow, slow, dark corner of startup death? And how do you escape it? Let's find out.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  What are some of the reasons why people don't want to launch their companies sometimes that we run across?

• 1:01Speaker 04

  I think the first thing is that most founders, like when it's the first time, they don't know. Like, it's so scary to get out in the world. Like, people are going to see them. You see, like, as long as they have not launched, nobody knows about them. It's safe.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, what are they scared of? What are some of the actual fears that we come across?

• 1:15Speaker 04

  I think they're scared that nobody shows up. Nobody's actually, like, watched their video, or go to their website, or try their product. And that's kind of an existential risk for them. You know, if nobody shows up, if nobody tries their product, what have they been spending the last three, six, 12 months of their life on?

• 1:34Speaker 00

  I think sometimes the implication then is if nobody shows up, I'm dumb. Or if nobody shows up, I'm wrong.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  I think it's also liberating. Like, you know, until you've launched the first time, you're worried about launching. That's kind of scary. Once you've launched once, and then even if it doesn't go well, like, what's the worst case?

• 1:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  Nobody sees you? Well, you launch again one week, one week later. Everything's okay. And so I think that I saw that in a lot of founders, once they had launched, they were liberated to do actually other stuff, to learn from customers, of course, and then to improve their product and continue, like, in the right direction versus trying to be optimal, like, for their first launch so that they would do a big splash. So why is it bad to wait?

• 2:19Speaker 05

  Well, great question. When you don't launch, or when you wait too long to launch, you are missing out and delaying the actual learning that you could be having by having real people reacting to what you're doing.

• 2:33Speaker 03

  It's natural to worry that no one will show up to the party when you launch. But if you find yourself over-rotating on that thought, remember the Airbnb story. Airbnb launched three times before anyone started to pay attention. But each time they launched, they learned something new, improved the product, and kept going. But what about some of the more dangerous myths that exist about launching? Here's Michael and Diana.

• 3:01Speaker 05

  When it comes to launching, I think it's one of the many topics where founders have what I call pop culture knowledge.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  It's like knowledge that is false but widely believed. And like, one of the most important pieces of pop culture knowledge is that your launch is important.

• 3:19Speaker 06

  And that you only get one?

• 3:21Speaker 05

  And that people will remember it. I think a secondary piece of pop culture knowledge is that if people try your product once and they don't like it, they'll never try it again. I love these moments because what I usually do with founders when they're nervous about launching is I go through a litany of products that they use every day, and I ask them if they ever remember the launch. Like, did you ever remember Uber's launch? Did you ever remember DoorDash's launch? Do you ever remember Google's launch? And if launches are so important, wouldn't you know about the launches of the most important companies in the world? I think pop culture knowledge is so dangerous in general because like, it pervades us. Like, it's literally seeping out of every information spouter. No one questions it.

• 4:02Speaker 06

  I think the other reason why founders are so precious about it, especially first-time founders, is that a lot of them might have worked at a big company.

• 4:11Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  And big companies do have these fancy shows to launch. You think of the Apple one, that's like a full production show with... Multi-year in the process that you get this one shot and all the reporters are there.

• 4:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 06

  And then as a founder that was an employee, you get this big carrot and stick. It's like, okay, we have this one launch, we're going to dub dub the C and we gotta get it right. And the funny thing is big companies and the leadership uses it a bit of a forcing function to get people to move.

• 4:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 4:45Speaker 06

  And then founders think, oh, I did this at a big company. Of course, this is how my product needs to be done because when I was an engineer at Apple, I had to work for, let's say, the Vision Pro project.

• 4:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:59Speaker 06

  It's like, I don't know, eight years, a decade of work and it's like one shot.

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:04Speaker 06

  But that's a myth for startups, this does not apply.

• 5:06Speaker 05

  So one of the cool things about Y C is that it's not really our job to yell at you.

• 5:12Speaker 06

  Right, we're not your bosses at all.

• 5:14Speaker 05

  Not your bosses. And so we tend to advise folks on what to do. Um, smart people tend to listen to us, but the kind of general founder will tend to look at what their peers are doing in the batch.

• 5:26Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 5:26Speaker 05

  And I think that by putting people in a batch together, especially smart people, peer pressure is applied.

• 5:32Speaker 06

  It's just so effective.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:34Speaker 06

  Because you see left and right, it's like, oh, this person next to me lodge and I haven't yet. And then they go through office hours or group office hours and they don't have anything to show for.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 5:46Speaker 06

  And at least looking good to your fellow founders that you respect. That that internal motivation, if at least overcomes that fear, that fud of this pop culture thing or too precious, that forcing function is so effective. And this is how

• 6:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:03Speaker 06

  Y C companies have a higher chances of success. They don't shoot themselves in the foot by dying of being anonymous.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:11Speaker 06

  Just by launching.

• 6:12Speaker 03

  As Diana pointed out, if you worked at a big company before starting your own, you might have the wrong model of launching in your head. Companies like Apple and Google have infinite budgets. They spend years developing new products and millions of dollars on each launch. If you applied that to any of your startup, your company would die long before you launched anything. Next, Gustav and Tom talk about using your launch to find the right customers and learning to love rejection.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Most people, when you see a new launch or a new thing, and it wasn't that great, just don't have time to care.

• 6:49Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  You're just like, great, I'm gonna get on my emails.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, close tab and continue with my life.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  No one ever says, "I will never go to this website ever again because this was bad." It never happens.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  I have a bookmark folder of all the services I refused to use because their initial launch was so terrible.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So people assume that there's all this kind of like attention on your product. And if it doesn't go well, it just doesn't go well. But the truth is, like, honestly, most people don't care.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Totally. And it's found as it's like the center of their universe. They've spent so much time and effort on this thing. For everyone else, it's like this footnote in their day-to-day life.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And even the bad launches, most people won't like it anyway. I always talk about like, most people are not early adopters. So if people don't care, not early adopters, that's fine. If you just get a small number of people who care a lot, then that's enough. You build on that, and maybe they carried up the one feature that is better than GitHub. And then you build on that and you keep going from there.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. One thing I talk to founders a lot about is founders, especially B2B founders, see early-stage sales as trying to convince everyone that they want to use your product, right? And it's not about that at all. If you have 100 sign-ups on your website, it's more about filtering down those 100 into the five or six who actually have the problem that you're addressing, who have such a hair-on-fire problem, they might use your janky MVP solution.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  They might even feel empathy for your company. They might even feel like, wow, this is the only person who's trying to make my job better. So I should support them.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  And so it's about filtering. Early-stage sales is way more about filtering down to your ideal customers than trying to convince the other. And people say, "What about those other 95?" And you say, "We'll come back in six months. Here's our feature roadmap. We'll be able to serve you in six or 12 months. We'll see you soon."

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Another reason people don't want to do this is that it feels good. You really don't have to ask anyone what they think about your product. Just ask yourself.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  And if you ask yourself, I'm not going to upset myself with how things are going.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  But other people might do that and it feels bad to put yourself in a position where others might give you criticism or feedback. So it's better to just like, well, if I know everything what everyone's gonna say anyway, I'm gonna just keep working on myself.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  And programmers love to write code. And so they feel like they're spending 10 or 12 hours a day writing more code and that's being productive, right? That's moving the startup forwards. But actually, no, it's doing the thing that's uncomfortable. Getting out of the building, talking to customers, getting that critical feedback and truly kind of introspecting on your product to sort of ask like, is this really the thing that's solving their problem or not?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Why do you think that's the case? This is a very common behavior, I think, is that people are afraid of doing the things that feels uncomfortable, whether it's consumer, doing a bigger launch, or versus B2B, actually talking to customers. Why do people?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Lack of social skills. I think there are a lot of programmers who are just very, very comfortable sitting behind a computer writing code.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  And they're very good. They're really good at solving all their problems that way.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  And they're like discreet problems, right? They're sort of very well-defined problems, like the code compiles or the code does not compile. You get out into the real world and the problems are like more, like sometimes trickier, sometimes like more ambiguous. There's a bunch of like social skills you have to have to try and like unpick all of this feedback and it like, it feels deeply uncomfortable when someone's criticizing you. And in a way, it's just easier not to deal with that at all and just sit and live in like the comfortable little castle of writing code.

• 9:54Speaker 02

  It might have to do with just like that criticism, you'll take it personally. But in reality, what you think about is that they're just not your customer.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  And that's fine. Like it's kind of, if you do ever do sales, you will learn to love the rejections and you get really good at that and that's not actually bother you anymore.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Or fundraising.

• 10:10Speaker 02

  Or fundraising. Those are two ways to love and rejections and don't actually get that too intimidated by it.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  So I think there is a difference of stage here. When you are super small, you should absolutely launch early with the jankiest MVP you have because there's very little downside.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  It sort of changes as you grow.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  Not everyone is going to be an early adopter of your product. At Y C, we tell founders to focus on building something 100 people love, not something 1 million people kind of like. Those 100 people who love your product become your viral sales force. Launching will help you find those first 100 customers, or maybe even just the first 10. If someone is willing to pay for the jankiest version of your product, you'll know you're solving a real problem. Now, what do you do if you launch your product and no one uses it? Here's Hargen Pete.

• 11:05Speaker 08

  So you've launched, your product is out there, and nobody uses it. What do you do?

• 11:10Speaker 07

  Um, cry.

• 11:14Speaker 07

  Again, the best founders just view everything, like we were talking about earlier, like they're learning, they're sponges. And so I think they just treat this as something like a problem they need to solve and diagnose. You want to look at like, where is like, why are you not getting any users or customers? Where's the drop off? I think you treat it like an analytical problem. Like, is it because people aren't returning my, like replying my emails, like asking to give them a demo? Okay, like, can I tweak the messaging? Is that what's going on? Am I targeting the wrong people? And then you just like, week by week, you're like, okay, like you tweak one variable. Like, okay, I'm going to try a different messaging copy in my emails, see if I get more people booking demos. And if that works, great. And if it doesn't, you're like, okay, like maybe I'm just targeting the wrong people. Maybe I'm trying to sell into like 1,000 person enterprise companies,

• 11:59Speaker 07

  and I should be targeting smaller companies. Like I always find like, it's like tweaking those variables one by one is like how you kind of dig yourself out of the hole. Let's say you've launched, you're out there, you've been out there for a little bit of time, and you still just don't have users or growth. Like, how do you know when it's time to keep tweaking? And how do you know when it's time to just like, call it a day and pivot into something else?

• 12:19Speaker 08

  I think that's a good question. It's one of these things that I think is more art than science. The way that I would prompt a founder that was in that situation is something isn't working, right? You're out there, you've been trying, you're pulling every lever you can think of to pull, and just nobody's biting, nobody's using your product. Which one of your assumptions was wrong? Right? And that like, it doesn't mean that this is a bad idea. It doesn't mean that you need to pivot to something else necessarily. But it does mean that you've made a bad assumption and you need to figure out what that is and develop a new hypothesis about the world.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you launch and no one uses your product, it's not the end of the world. You can use your launch to diagnose the problem. It might be a messaging problem, or maybe you're targeting the wrong customer. Once you identify the problem and fix it, you can always launch again. Founders often find reasons to launch later because they're afraid. How do you break that fear? It turns out, if you focus on your goal, that's the way. Here's Aaron and Serby.

• 13:24Speaker 09

  What's really hard is the mental mindset that you have to be in. And I think a lot of times people have that fear. And one of the ways that I've found to try to break out of that fear cycle that's in your brain is if you look at risky decisions and you say to yourself, well, my goal with this is actually to learn, then I can't fail. You know, if your goal with your launch is to learn, it's not like, oh, we gotta make $10,000 in revenue or whatever, it's just to learn, then like you would do it way faster.

• 13:56Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 09

  And you will be successful no matter what happens. Even if somebody says, this product's stupid, I hate it. Like you've learned something and that's progress. So now you can get to the right direction faster.

• 14:05Speaker 10

  Every bit of learning is so valuable, right? In the early days, you're kind of just going out there and feels like you're throwing darts at a wall. But every time you do throw a dart, you learn something about where the bullseye might be. You know, you get a little bit closer. So what advice would you have for founders who are in this pre-launch phase and are feeling a little bit of that fear? What would you say to encourage them?

• 14:28Speaker 09

  I would encourage them to cut the scope of what they think they need to build. Brex, you know, which was started out as a credit card for startups. They didn't even have a way to create user accounts. Like you just like emailed them your password and that's how they set up the account for you. You know, and like they didn't have a dashboard and like all these things. If you were planning out the features of all the stuff that you would need before you can launch fully, they were like, we don't need that. Like, we just want the core thing. And I think actually one of the benefits of launching way before you even feel ready is it's the best way to test if somebody really wants it. If you give somebody a janky product and they still use it, then that speaks volumes about how important that problem is that you're solving.

• 15:14Speaker 10

  Absolutely.

• 15:15Speaker 09

  I remember one of our earliest launches, before we pivoted to creative market, we actually went through Y C as Color Lovers, a creative design community. And we had been around for a little while and we decided to relaunch our product. And so we had spent forever like rebuilding the code base and, you know, adding all these new features and took forever. And we planned this big press event at the Y C office and we're inviting these reporters and invited all of our batchmates and stuff. And we launched the new product that day, the new version of it. And everything goes to shit. Basically, page loads take 30 seconds, the whole site is down.

• 15:56Speaker 09

  And it turned out that what happened was the Google bots realized that we had changed all these pages and started indexing us really heavily, like crawling it.

• 16:05Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 09

  And it was like a denial of service attack that we put on our own site. And it took us forever. We were freaking out. And at the end of the day, nobody cared in either direction. People weren't like, wow, there's this brand new thing. And we saw some huge spike and uptick. And at the same time, nobody cared that it was down. We just eventually fixed it and everyone kind of went on their way.

• 16:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, right, right, right. But in the moment, it feels absolutely catastrophic.

• 16:29Speaker 09

  And the problem was we put so many eggs in that basket of the launch being successful. And if you just kind of take the pressure off, you know, and not try to make it some big event. Then it's just a lot easier and a lot more focused on the thing that really matters, which is just learning and growing from it.

• 16:45Speaker 10

  Absolutely. Is there such a thing as launching too early?

• 16:48Speaker 09

  I think the only version of launching too early is when your product doesn't actually work. It adds no value, you know?

• 16:54Speaker 10

  It's like the website's immediately broken.

• 16:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, exactly. It's like you click the button and nothing happens.

• 16:59Speaker 10

  That might be too early.

• 17:00Speaker 09

  Yeah, like make the product work.

• 17:02Speaker 10

  Right.

• 17:03Speaker 09

  But I think the disconnect that founders have a lot of times is the level of polish that needs to happen, or whether you need to be able to like actually create user accounts or, you know, again, doing things that don't scale. The founder can just manually handle some of that stuff in the background rather than building out an automated system that's going to take another three weeks and push back your launch.

• 17:23Speaker 10

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 09

  So like, in general, no, I don't think you can launch too early as long as there's some, you know, minimum value that the product actually provides.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  Launch early, launch often. The best founders use launches to diagnose problems, find their early adopters, iterate on the product based on customer feedback, and then they launch again. You can see early-stage YC startups launch their new products on ycombinator.com/launch and right here on YouTube, on Instagram, on X, on TikTok, all the different social platforms. So someday, we hope we get to see your products launch there too. Until next time, I'm Gary Tan, and we'll see you on the next episode of Office Hours.