http://thinkvitamin.com/business/3-lessons-i-learned-from-launching-a-product/
Not all advice is created equal, and we have certainly followed the wrong trail many times because of bad advice. In fact, I want to first offer a piece of advice on advice: trust your instincts. If the advice doesn’t sit well with you, don’t blindly follow it because Mr. Gray Hair with 40 years of experience says so.
Chances are, his advice is for a time period that is long gone and won’t work in today’s environment. Make sure the advice you follow is relevant and from people who are doing stuff now. Taking advice form someone with 10 years of enterprise software sales in the 90s is probably not the path you should follow as a consumer web startup in 2010.
Your First Design will be Ugly
"...delaying launching for design is never worth it."Eat, Sleep and Breath your Product Launch
I find that most startup advice generally targets companies that have already launched but doesn’t really address entrepreneurs just trying to get an idea into fruition. If you are still at the idea-stage, everything you do should be focused around launching.Stalk Your Customers
Rule #1 of any startup is to build a product that solves your own needs.... Eventually you will probably evolve from being your own target customer.As a startup, you need to stalk your customers. You need to know what their passions are, what they do for fun, typical hangout places, their sleep schedules… You need to know your customers better than you know yourselves so you can always answer the question: What Would Customer Do?
