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Ask HN: To launch or not to launch

3 points by qixxiq 16y ago

I've been working on a B2B SaaS billing site for almost a year now, we never officially "launched" it - but signup has always been open to South Africans only. With just local users the business model has already proved profitable. The question I'm stuck with now, is do we launch it internationally as soon as possible (after a couple days work with timezones and currencies) or do I wait till we're better equipped to deal with the traffic and growth. 1. We're a very small team at the moment, we're trying to hire urgently but unfortunately the task of finding top notch developers locally is more than a little challenging. A big concern is if its popular it is unlikely we'll be able to scale quickly enough (support wise, and service wise) -- our plates are pretty much full as it is. 2. I've been following the "move fast and break things" philosophy. I've achieved very rapid development (I'm the only developer), but it has come at the cost of occasionally broken parts of the site (generally for less than an hour). With < 500 users this hasn't been a problem, but I'm assuming it will be once we've launched internationally. Also 'service standards' in South Africa are far worse than the rest of the world - which means our current users are generally far more forgiving than we expect international users to be. 3. I'd like to wait for the API to be ready (another post on that later). I've been working on an experimental API that I believe is pretty "cool" (you can browse it and test it out with a standard web browser) Has anyone here ever launched too early and regretted it? Vice versa has anyone wished they launched earlier?

horofox 16y ago
Well as it has been proved to be profitable and you already have clients, it's up to you do decide it(well... it has always been up to you) as you are probably the only who know how big your public will be. If you are afraid of stuff breaking up/it not scaling so well and so on, work on it until you feel satisfied. As you already said, it's B2B and service standards may vary from country to country. A good experience would be try to get some clients from another country with "high service standards" and try to give them some benefits to try it out the services(for free maybe?) and if the feedback is good enough you launch it. If you would like to wait for the API to be ready, just do it. I know that there's a lot of people that would say that "launch it with 50% done" or something, but the person that know your product best is YOU. I hope you have much success with it!

3 points by qixxiq 16y ago

horofox 16y ago

Well as it has been proved to be profitable and you already have clients, it's up to you do decide it(well... it has always been up to you) as you are probably the only who know how big your public will be. If you are afraid of stuff breaking up/it not scaling so well and so on, work on it until you feel satisfied. As you already said, it's B2B and service standards may vary from country to country. A good experience would be try to get some clients from another country with "high service standards" and try to give them some benefits to try it out the services(for free maybe?) and if the feedback is good enough you launch it. If you would like to wait for the API to be ready, just do it. I know that there's a lot of people that would say that "launch it with 50% done" or something, but the person that know your product best is YOU. I hope you have much success with it!