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Recently I met a client who had an app that was 90% built but not yet launched. The code base was huge and the app had almost 100 features. Yet it never saw the daylight as the testing team was listing one bug after another and the developers were busy fixing it, creating a never ending circle. 

One fine day the management decided to pull the plug on the app team and the effort that was taken to build the app was all flushed down the drain.

In the last decade I have worked with many clients that has made the same mistake of launching too late or never launching. 

One CEO even told his CTO that anything that has his stamp will have to be of top quality. Three years into production and the app was still not launched. 

Be it bad practice or ill managed process or the desire for pursuit of excellence there can be many reasons for amazing software products to never see the daylight. Or when it does the market has moved on to the next big thing. 

Do not chase excellence

In 2014 I was working as a CTO for a product company and was tasked to build a web based helpdesk application. At the time Freshdesk was not the behemoth that it is today. We named it Hilfedesk. Hilfe means help in German. 

I have extensively used helpdesk applications like Request Tracker and others so I knew what functionalities they had and how teams used helpdesk software. 

Based on that experience we built the very first version of Hilfedesk using Java and Google Datastore. We built all the core features and the helpdesk was functioning as expected. As part of the beta version we built all the core features but did not build the reporting features and escalation policies. 

At this point of time I approached the CEO to seek his approval to launch Hilfedesk internally, i.e. we will migrate out of Freshdesk into Hilfedesk. The CEO outrightly rejected the plan. I still remember what he told me, "I can't put my stamp on anything that is not world class". 

This definitely was a bad decision and the CEO let his emotions run wild. 

A world class product is an ongoing process and is never a destination. Organizations or teams that focus on releasing a world class product should understand this. 

So ideal strategy here is to launch the app and then "perfect" it gradually over a period of time. 

The goal here is to build a business with the app. 

 

Focus on the MVP

MVP stands for minimum viable product. It is the bare minimum set of features that your application needs to solve the problem that it is intended to solve. 

When you are planning or building your application, focus on building the MVP first. Once the MVP is ready you have to launch the application into the market. 

Now the million dollar question that we all have is how to decide what is the MVP. 

I once read that planning the MVP is more of an art than science. Though this is partially true I don’t fully agree. In my experience of launching more than 20 apps (both mobile and web apps) I can confidently say that there is a scientific way to build and launch a MVP. 

Focus on the core workflow of your app.

What does the app do? Write down in a piece of paper, what is the core functionality of the app without which the app will not function. 

For example, a task management app’s primary functionality is to help users in managing their tasks. So at the least it should have the following features, without which the users will not be able to use task management app to manage their tasks.

• Create task
• View task
• Close task
• Edit task

Now there can be other bells and whistles in the app and they can be features like change password, change profile pic, notifications etc. But as I said they are bells and whistles. They obviously make the application more useful and competitive in the market but they do not contribute towards solving the main problem which is to help users manage their tasks. 

So the lesson here is to build the core features first. These set of core features should be enough to solve the main problem that it intends to solve. This is MVP. 

For sure this might be easier said than done but once you do it a couple of times it becomes second to nature. 

Market has better lessons

Once your MVP is ready you should launch it to the market. No more waiting and no more fooling around in pursuit of perfection. Just launch it. 

There are two types of launch. 1. Soft launch, 2. Hand launch. 

Soft launch, also known as a soft opening, is a preview release of a product or service to a limited audience prior to the general public. 

Hard launch, an occasion when a new product or service is made available to the public, not just a limited number of people, in a way that is intended to attract a lot of attention.

Now that we have understood what soft launch and hard launch means, let's look at how we can use these. 

When the MVP is done we should soft launch the app. This means that we release the app in public but do not market it. Instead we onboard a small set of customers to use the app free of cost. 

These early customers/users are called early adopters. Early adopters use the app in realtime and provide valuable feedback, i.e. new feature requests or bugs. 

They help in improving the app and it's offerings.

After a few months of improvising the MVP we add few more features and do the hard launch. 

This is when we get to the top of a building and yell to the whole world that we exist. 

Building a business should be the goal

It is important to publish or release an app to the whole world but it is not the end of it. The eventual goal is to build a business around our app. Without a solid business that generates revenue, the app is nothing but a hobby. 

So after you launch the app, focus on selling and marketing the app so that your target audience learn about you and start considering you as a potent service provider to solve their business problems.

Remember the goal here is to launch a successful business and not to launch an app. 

So focus on all the boring parts like marketing, sales and customer support so that the app turns into a a successful business and generates you some income.