How Startups Launch Products That Customers Want

Five questions you need to answer before starting a new project

Joe Procopio
6 min readApr 29, 2021

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There’s no worse feeling for an entrepreneur than pushing a brilliant idea all the way through execution and then launching that new product or feature to dead silence.

But oddly enough, we entrepreneurs tend to do this a lot. In fact, I just did it again myself. Even after building over a dozen startups over a couple decades, I still dive right into this trap headfirst.

Ask anyone who creates new things for a living and they’ll tell you that the key to success is to underpromise and overdeliver. This is almost always true, because you’ll never go broke surpassing artificially low expectations. But I’ve also learned that underpromising almost always means building something nobody is asking for.

If you want to launch a new product or a new feature to a high level of customer engagement, you need to overpromise and overdeliver.

Here’s how to do that.

Don’t bet big on experiments

Entrepreneurs are creatures of risk and vision. When we have a half-baked idea, we like to fully bake that idea by getting hands-on and building it out.

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com