Matt Mullenweg Quotes

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there.

The most important thing in startups is getting a product to market, as imperfect as it may be, and then iterating on it and continually making it better. A first rev of a site that has a few typos may not be perfect, but it was the start of something that I deeply believed in.

I've long believed that if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released too late.

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7.

Don't worry, be crappy. Revolutionary means you ship and then test... Lots of things made the first Mac in 1984 a piece of crap - but it was a revolutionary piece of crap.

We can provide beta software to our developers in advance of the general public. We can easily link up with external partners, customers, and suppliers.

It was very early, and we were still like beta or alpha stage, and so we started receiving a ton of download. The server became overloaded, and that's when I realized that this had a huge market.

Most big companies work in stealth until they think they have a consumer product ready to go.

You've got to stay super focused on shipping product. There isn't a version two or three if there isn't a great version one.

Internet and mobile product development cycles are measured in months, not years. And the capital required to get a product built and into the market is less than $1 million. And the returns, when things work out, can be enormous.

Companies often visit my office, or invite me to theirs, to brief me on new products, Web sites, or software before they are released - usually a few weeks or days ahead of time. I don't review most of these products.

Regardless of how Beautified turned out, it was a great experience, and it was an excellent product and one that people really appreciated in the space.

Get a minimum viable product out there, test it out, see how customers respond.

Before product/market fit, your only job that matters is to build a great product.

The Googly thing is to launch products early on Google Labs and then iterate, learning what the market wants - and making it great. The beauty of experimenting in this way is that you never get too far from what the market wants. The market pulls you back.

The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Life is a beta. Voltaire said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Google lives the rule as it introduces every new product as a beta. That is Google's way to say that it trusts us to help it finish its products. It is Google's way to open up its design process to our wisdom.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late.

To make a label change is a difficult time because there is that lag period between the product you had out and the next project you're going to make on your new label.

It's important not only to have the right timing of when the hardware is going to be released but also when we are going to be able to introduce quality software.

I casually advise a few young companies, and I'm always surprised when I see them overthinking simple problems, adding too much structure too early, and trying to get formal too soon. Start-ups should embrace their scrappiness, not rush to toss it aside.

Decades before we were able to articulate the value of 'getting out of the building' and the Lean Startup, the value in having skunk works controlling their own distribution was starkly evident.

Product development is emotional for me! It's really important as a brand that we feel that our products are going to be life-changing for everyone who buys them. We won't ever launch something we don't feel strongly about.

The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.

In software speed to market, speed to learning is really key. In hardware if you screw it up you are dead. So accuracy really matters.