No posts from me since May because I have been working fairly non stop on my new company. We are in stealth mode, but getting ready to launch (soon!).

Guy Kawasaki is one of my favorite business writers and I was fortunate enough to partner with Garage Technology Ventures (when it was garage.com) when I raised venture capital for my first startup in 1999.

Guy has a new book out called “The Art of the Start”. I am waiting for my copy right now, in the meantime, I have been thinking all summer about one of Guy’s earlier books - Rules for Revolutionaries. One of my favorite rules is “Don’t Worry, Be Crappy”. What Guy means by that is that the best way to develop a product (and a company) is to get your product out the door, in the hands of real customers, as quickly as possible, even if it sucks (but not too much).

What you lose in “polish” and “presentation” along with some functionality is more than made up for in finding out (1) whether the customers are interested in buying what you are selling and (2) what you forgot about that customers actually need. No matter how much thinking the team does on product features, customers will always come up with different or additional stuff that they have to have and they will let you know about it.

Of course, you always have to reach out to your customer base and communicate that your product is under development and needs more work, you want to partner with the customer in making the best product possible, etc. Don’t claim your product is perfect when you know it is not, be humble.

I have used “Don’t Worry, be Crappy” twice now. When we launched Coreflix, we had a basic product and bam, customers were on it from day one. We did have to add features but the development process was much more focused with real customers giving us real feedback as opposed to focus groups, etc.

We are using it again now on our new company. We started out this summer with a really crappy beta that had only the bare minimum functions. This time we had to test not only whether beta customers were interested and would pay for the product, but also whether the algorithms the service is based on would work. The answer on both counts was an unqualified yes, but we also found we had to go back to the workshop and create a much more “automatic” product that was easier to use - around a 90 day process of very long days (and nights).

Once again though, “Don’t Worry, Be Crappy” pointed us in the right direction.

I wish Guy’s book had been around in 1999. We didn’t use “Don’t Worry, Be Crappy” at Netfreight.com and we spent over a million dollars developing our beta product before we got input from customers. Of course, we would need that money later, and when we didn’t have it, we didn’t have many choices.

“Don’t Worry, Be Crappy” is probably one of my most valuable lessons learned.