Why You Haven't Launched a Product Yet

and how to do it ASAP

Sep 30, 2024

Hi friends 👋

I want you to launch a product.

I firmly believe that most of you can learn more from trying to launch a product than from taking another course or watching a YouTube short on being hyper-productive.

In this newsletter, you’ll learn how you can do it.

Why Now

Technology has gotten insanely better.

Now you can run things on a $5 Cloud Server that was considered a bottleneck 10 years ago due to a lack of processing power.

And before you throw in the argument, “but it won’t scale”, let’s just listen to what David Heinemeier Hansson aka. dhh said during his keynote at the recent Rails World 2024 conference - it’s a 15-second clip I made for you.

But let’s not stop at software products, because this applies to launching just about anything.

For example, writing is 10 times more accessible.

You can use LLMs to brainstorm, edit, and finalize the script for your video or course or to proofread and find inconsistencies in your book chapters.

The reason why you haven’t launched a product is because you’re thinking too far ahead.

Key Takeaways

Do it, now.

start small
launch fast
scrappy is good

Let’s go over each one and I’ll add my experience. 👇

Start Small

I launched my first paid product in February 2021: How to Build Better Portfolio Projects - as a web developer.

It’s a ~40-page e-book that helps developers create outstanding portfolio projects. In 2020, when the money printer went BRRRR, the outsourcing company I worked with started hiring more – like everyone else.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve seen the same Todo list, memory game, or the same “small blog” template in developer CVs. The projects didn’t give a good picture of what the developer was capable of and worst of all, we probably missed out on good people, who didn’t know how to present themselves.

The book is short, practical, and took about a week to write, working on it after work hours.

I also paid a professional proofreader to check it for $40. Today with LLMs, you can save this money for something else.

I immediately made one of the biggest mistakes of launches that you can make. I launched on a federal holiday in the USA – Presidents Day.

Maybe it works for some, but for info products, like books and courses, I’ll never launch again during a holiday. Sales were coming in later but I think I missed out on a big initial traffic & reviews.

Launch fast

I almost didn’t finish my second book, Building Cloud-Based PWAs with Supabase, React & TypeScript. But I’m glad I did! After a month of publishing, it has as many readers as the book I launched in April.

When the thought of not finishing it first occurred to me, I knew I was losing motivation. I have to launch fast or it’s a dead project - after many lost projects, I knew what to do.

This helped me push through and get the book out.

Sometimes you lose motivation and that’s OK.

Motivation is tricky for me. It fades while working on a side project, thinking, yeah it will come back later. But when that happens, it makes me start something else. That’s why speed is crucial in launching.

My motivation window for short books is under a month, closer to three weeks. This is for getting the body of the book ready. But because it’s a technical book with lots of code and examples, I check it at least twice to verify that everything works. That’s another week.

Speed also forces you to sacrifice quality, length, and detail–the things that are killing your ideas right now.

But I’m not saying launch crap.

I’m saying, be aware of how long before you run out of motivation.

Scrappy is Good

Starting with YouTube helped me ditch the perfection pill.

I make scrappy videos like this:

If you’re not following me, you know what to do 😁 Subscribe, share, like 🎸🦖.

So making these videos taught me one big lesson.

Only others can tell if your stuff is useful.

They tell this by liking, commenting, watching, replying, or paying.

I certainly can’t tell if I was scripting my videos, or if I would have a proper YouTuber setup that would help people more. What and how I’m doing it is helpful, and I know this from feedback.

But if this is not enough proof that scrappy is good, I’m working again on Repurpost, a SaaS idea that helps you repurpose your long-form content for social media. I’m getting new users and great feedback, which is great!

I already have a payment link, but still rocking Create Next App as a page title, as someone just noticed:

if you aren’t from the JavaScript/Next.js world, it’s a title that a template generator gives you by default

I mean, the logo is also an emoji, but here’s the thing:

It doesn’t matter.

People have a link to click, spend money, and get their stuff done.

Will it stay this way forever?

Probably not, but I might just decide to kill this idea after a month because I lost interest, so why bother with things that don’t bring in money?

I hope I gave you some great examples of scrappy stuff that makes money while helping people. Two wonderful things you can do as well.

So how are you going to start?

Do you have an idea in your mind? Simply reply to this email or ping me on some other channel and I’d be more than happy to give you some feedback!

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