MVP 

Peter Reinhardt [17:36] - The debate was whether to build out the full  product  and then  test  for  product-market fit  by trying to sell it to people versus this super, super lightweight  MVP  landing page that we would put on  Hacker News  to see if there interest in the concept. What drove us towards the super, super lightweight  test  was actually the fact that there was a skeptical divide among the founders. Since the founders couldn't  agree , the only way to answer the  question  was to go to customers ASAP and get an answer. 

In this  post  I’m going to cover  product  development cycle fundamentals that I learned to help solve all of the  problems  above. This will help you rapidly iterate, measure,  test , and improve your  product  while fully engaging your team. This is not that same as shipping an  MVP . I’m assuming you’ve released an  MVP  and are figuring out what to do next, which is where most  startups  spend most of their  time

I brought on my co-founder after launching my  MVP

So, the next thing is the friends and family launch. So, if you're at idea stage, you can  test  out your short  pitch  on family and friends and see how they respond. And once you have an  MVP , do a friends and family launch as quickly as possible. So, in its earliest days,  Reddit  was shared just among the founders of their batch at  YC . You know, there were only eight companies. It was a really small  community . I use the Wayback Machine to actually see what  Reddit  looked like in its earliest days. It hasn't changed that much. But if you look closely, this is actually before they called upvotes "upvotes." They were calling it "boosts." This is, like, 2005, I think July. So, that's how they got their very first users, just sharing it among their  community  of founders. And so, you know, what I recommend you do is share the  product  with your friends and family, watch them use it, you know, sit down next to them and ask for  feedback , but don't stay in this phase for too long because your friends and family might not be the exact right, ideal user for your  product  or what you're building, and so sometimes their  feedback  isn't quite as helpful as a real user's is. So, for example, you know, if Alexis and Steve had shared this with their parents, their parents might have been like, "What the hell is this?" So, you know, get out of that family and friends circuit as fast as you can. 

So, before you even have a fully functioning  product , you get a chance to practice your  pitch  and you can refine it. You can A/B  test  it and see how people actually respond to the idea. And then once you have an  MVP  or, you know, a very early version of your  product , launching through different channels will give you an opportunity to see how people will respond to that early version of the  product . You know, and then launching to different channels will help you determine whether you're even talking to the right users because, you know, you might launch on one channel and get no response, you'll launch on another channel and you'll get a huge response. And so, that will help you identify whether, you know, you're identifying the right user for what you're building. So, let's talk about some of the types of launches that you can do while you're in  Startup School . And I'm excited to hear that, you know, 1,000 of you have launched so far since the start of  Startup School . That's incredible. So, I clicked on 10 random  Startup School  companies from founders who posted on the forum, and only about half had landing pages. So, this is what I call the silent launch, and you do not need anything fancy for this, you know. All you need is a domain name, your company name, a short description, a contact, and a call to action. So, for example, this is a random  Startup School  company that I found from a founder who'd posted on the forum. Their company is Zn. They have, you know, a domain name, they have their company name, they have their short one-line  pitch , a short description, and their call to action, which is, "Get in touch." The call to action can be something like, you know, "Subscribe to our newsletter," or, "Subscribe to hear more when we launch."  Product  Hunt, for example, has an actual  product  for pre-launch companies called Ship, and it's a way to collect, like, interest from potential users. So, for example, this is something called Designer  School , and it has a quick intro from the founders, a short description of what the company does, and the call to action, which is "Subscribe." So, you know, you can go on  Product  Hunt and set up one of these pages. But, of course, you can also build your own landing page incredibly quickly and easily, and this should be something, if you don't have one yet, that you do this weekend.