When working on a new idea, if you’re not sure if its viable or where to focus, its generally a good idea to start building, optimizing get code out into the world and take feedback! This flys in the face of traditional advice, which is usually “problem validation” first, but we’ve found, when there’s likely a problem, but it’s not clear what solution will win, this approach tends to drive you to faster conclusions than a lot of pre-product user feedback or market brainstorming.
How does this look in practice? It means shipping code regularly - daily, or multiple times a day, in a way that enables exposure to many eyeballs, either to a SaaS product that has self-signup, and encourages interaction, or as an open source product where those changes can be picked up and examined / put into practice quickly.
In the early days of Intrigue, it was clear that we just needed to start collecting data and sharing it. This occurred to me while on a run, and in retrospect it was obvious. If you’re not sharing value to folks, you’re building in a vacuum or in a place wehere it was impossible to get high quality feedback.
It also means having a community that’s engaged and able to give you feedback is key. There are lots of ways to start on this. Simply choosing a problem that folks care about, say, cloud security and throwing together a slack with a few invites is a good start, but it’s not enough - you’ll need to promote it, and bring value to that group.
What does value look like… well the software you’re continuously shipping is part of it - and you should have a way to notify your community when there’s new shiny bits available, but (at least in cyber) sharing new attacker techniques, as well as best practices amongst the community can keep the conversation flowing.
It’s okay if there’s not 100% test coverage and docs are a bit wanting in the early days, as long as your community is able to reliably extract value, understand the problem and how you’re approaching it, and communicate this value. Maximize for word of mouth.
This is true whether you’re a single person startup or whether you’re working inside an organization and driving innovation internally.
Even when startups are acquired, if you can iterate quickly, youre much more likely to drive a successful integration. For example, when Intrigue was acquired, we:
This led to the perception that we were moving much much faster than the legacy platforms, and it prompted a lot of inquiries about building on top of our system, driving more opportunity for the team.
Optimize for Iteration Speed. And Ship!
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