What Sam meant was "take the time to build a product your users love, no matter how long it takes, before you focus on growth " (addition mine).
You should absolutely release your product to customers to gather feedback as early as possible, just don't fuel growth by spending before you're sure you've got the product 100% right and people love it.
What I think is missing in this is the matter of customer service. Get that right and everything follows, get that wrong and you are going to be slowed down by growth because far too much customer service time is spent along the way.
Imagine you sell a simple widget available in three sizes and two colours. A very simple product. Yet 10% of sales result in returns. If it takes you three days to respond to returns requests and then another hour processing a return weeks after the customer requested it then you are also going to have some damage done to your company brand on social media and customers that will not buy from you again.
It is not actually the widget that is the product, it is the whole sales process for that widget via the website that is the product. The customer service aspects of it need to be done really well before you grow. In the above example you can build out the forms for managing returns so that there is minimal effort needed, a scan and a mouse click in the warehouse, all communication with the customer handled totally automatically and procedures in place for the parts of the process that do need a human.
It can take weeks of work to get all of the customer service elements working properly, many of those aspects might seem to fail cost benefit analysis at the start, why spend ages making neat forms so your customer can return your product when you are really concerned with selling the product? Yet, if growth happens, this will be important. It could take an hour to process a returned widget when you take into account what happens in the warehouse, the office and in accounts. Or this task could be done in a leisurely five minutes if organised. The former is bad for the brand, the latter much better. You could get ten returned widgets a day, taking all day to do. This would deny you the time to build out those customer service forms needed for the five minute process to happen. You would need to hire an order manager person or a programmer to put the back end systems in place or else you are going to be stuck processing returns for unhappy customers, late, all day, every day. Maybe if you work hard they will not rate your widgets so badly.
So it is a classic step in time saves nine. But the product isn't just the widget, it is the distribution and customer service. Customers won't be able to love your product if they cannot get it or if you cannot sort their problems out with it.
Now managers with sales targets to hit could start advertising the widget before all of the customer service parts are in place. They may view too many returns as a nice problem to have and just think they can hire some interns if help is needed with that. Growth is gone for, widgets sell well but with the ten fold increase in sales is a ten fold increase in returns. Before long a whole returns department is established. This gains its own inertia and involves so many people that it becomes practically impossible to implement a simple form change to speed up customer returns.
The widget itself can be quite boring, it doesn't have to set the world on fire. The product is bigger than that, it is the brand, customer service and other things. This is what customers must love, and part of building a product they love is the dull customer service stuff. If you don't get those bits finished before you grow then you are just growing the amount of work for yourself.
Yeah the cognitive dissonance of startup advice can sometimes be jarring. In this case though I think you could say that fail fast refers to iterating on a product and changing it until people love it. Then the growth starts.
The poster child for not doing this in my mind is Adora Cheung. I remember watching her "growth at all costs" lecture from Startup School shortly after Homejoy shut down and thinking well, there you have it folks. Seems they suffered from exactly the leaky bucket problem Sam talks about here.
Two caveats: 1) I'm sure there are many other examples of leaky bucket companies, Homejoy just came to mind first 2) I still think Adora is brilliant and am really excited about her new cities project.
Part of the reason there is so much dissonance is the conflicting goals -- startup founders want THEIR product to succeed. VCs just need SOME products to succeed. So the advice that is tossed to cohorts of founders is designed to help some succeed, not to ensure the personal success of each individual founder.
Distinct actors and players have interests that are sometimes aligned or disjointed, but often contradictory. Though it may sound obvious, it clearly has not been fully internalized by plenty of folks. And when it has, few dare to draw the necessary conclusions that follow from it: always take everything you are told with a massive grain of salt. To be clear, I am not arguing that you should be a complete cynic, only that you ought to recognize that there can be a healthy dose of it. In particular when the stakes are high. Listen, but do not take everything at face value.
I am in an environment that has a particularly high density of genuinely enthusiastic, but naive, people; I am inclined to think that it is a mindset that's also predominant in other circles, besides University campuses.
Indeed, there seem to be quantities of people who are looking for silver-bullet secret sauces that will let them reach Steve Jobs status. Perhaps that's precisely because of the various personality cults that our industry subscribes to. I can't know for sure. And while I am sure there are some good anecdotes showing the contrary, it seems that, all in all, this is overall hurtful both to innovation and to the ones that try to accelerate it.
If you are going to be captain of a ship, you better not embrace any gust of wind that comes your way. Otherwise, you are more drifting away than going anywhere. And like Paris, you would rather be tossed by the waves than sink.
No, the rule still applies. Get it out fast so you can find out if your users love it. Just don't push it to a broader audience.
Iphone app companies do this one neat trick for this. They release in foreign markets (Canada, Australia, etc) and make sure their users love their apps before releasing in the US.
I remember seeing supermarket checkout scanners in Vancouver BC and wondering what this space age (now there's a dated term) technology was and why it wasn't already in use in Silicon Valley in 1980. George Bush was similarly amazed ... in 1992. The UPC was developed in the US starting in 1966 starting from freight car identification.
Yes, late product release in the US even if the product was developed in the US is an old technique.
George H. Bush was "amazed" because he was being shown a newly developed model just being rolled out that scanned form multiple angles instead of just the bottom.
Get it out as soon as you can to gather feedback, possibly in closed beta. Wait before net promoter score is good enough before spending lots of money on marketing?
i don't think there is too much tension between "lean" and focusing on product quality before growth. the best way to improve the product is to get people using it and use their feedback to improve it. that's what lean is all about.
airbnb's 1000 days are mentioned in the article. it is not like they were just coding in their living room during that time. they had a product out, and they were flying to NY to talk to every possible host, improving the listings, and so on -- learning what made the product awesome. it was probably tempting at the time to work on getting more hosts on the platform, or to optimize the number of bookings, and other growth stuff. that's what Sam is cautioning against.
There's this weird balance between the lean "get it out as soon as you can, fail fast" and "make sure it's a good product before you ship".