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When I was working on IMVU, we almost killed ourselves launching in only six months. At the time, we thought that was pretty impressive because our previous sta
by eries 11y ago
When I was working on IMVU, we almost killed ourselves launching in only six months. At the time, we thought that was pretty impressive because our previous startup had taken almost 5 years. But by today's standards, we were incredibly slow.
This may sound pedantic, but it kind of depends on what you mean by "launch" and what you mean by "startup." If you take something like CapTable.io, it only took a few weeks to get the initial version up and running although most people probably don't consider it "launched" at all.
- RevBio 11y agoI was talking about time to paying customers. Your distinction isn't pedantic at all - there's a big difference between something that requires physical R&D & a services platform. I'm doing biotech & I think 6 mo is incredibly fast.
- eries 11y agoOf course. The key is to learn as quickly as possible within the constraints of the medium you're working in. I've worked with startups that launched an MVP in days for $10 and ones that have spent more than a year and $10M+ to make the MVP. But here's a spooky though I'll leave you with. Often times, when startups are looking at their tools they will say: given the tools I have, the fastest I can build an MVP is X. But if you really take the criticality of learning seriously, you might say: given my desire to learn quickly, what tools can I use to go faster? And that's where a lot of breakthroughs happen, when you choose tools and platforms not based solely on their technical capabilities, but by their speed of iteration. (It's probably why Facebook was built on PHP.)