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2 reasons fast and frequent iterations are crucial to your startup’s success
Iterating. Many startups don’t think about its importance. It’s easy to feel that you’ll never need to iterate, especially at the beginning. Who needs to iterate when you have a golden idea? That’s the mindset of so many as they begin on their startup journey.
But the truth is this…
The ability to iterate fast can be what causes your startup’s success or its demise?
Why is that the case?
Well, what should be your goal when developing a product? The book Lean Startup by Eric Ries helps us to understand what the goal is. It is…
“…iterating with customers as rapidly as possible, running experiments, and then using validated learning to make real-time investment decisions about what to work on.” — Lean Startup by Eric Ries
To build a product that matches the need of your customer, you first need to know what your customer needs. This is accomplished when people use your product and then give feedback. Then you apply that feedback by iterating.
You might think: “Well I know what my customer needs already. I’ve studied their needs and tendencies.”
That’s good, and that’s a start. But seeing if and how, your product, solves your customer’s needs is a different story. You won’t know that until you’ve got the customer giving you feedback on your product.
This is why you must have a good process of ship, learn, and iterate.
But why is being able to iterate fast crucial to your startup’s success?
#1 — Allows your development to be based on customer feedback, which leads to a better product and happier customers.
Story Time:
On our most recent project Graffiti Maps we built an iOS application first. After building the iOS application we built a web app using React.
Once we released the React application, everything sped up tremendously. With our web app, we can push to production 100 times a day if we needed to. With the iOS application, 1 time a day. Why does that matter?
