This is the whole point. You go out there and get lambasted by customers so you know what to improve upon. If you sit in the shadows tinkering until its 'perfect,' it will only be perfect to you. Whereas if you are iterating against customer and stakeholder feedback, you will end up with a refined product fit for market that may even not look like what you initially expected the perfect product to look like.

The thing is, if your market is so small that you can’t burn out a few people on your product and still have potential customers, you’ve already lost.

Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.

Coca-Cola’s New Coke may be an example of this, though New Coke may have actually been the best marketing campaign possible for Coke Classic.

Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.

Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.

Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.

> For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.

But aren't there red flags?

How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?

Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.

Yeah that's the lean startup model. You intentionally find people who are early adopters and offer to bring them into the beta to improve the software. Its a win win situation because the feedback gives them what they want, and gives you a marketable product.

There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).

That may be true for massive companies like Google with huge exposure. But if you are some startup no-one has heard of then you are going to be doing really well if 0.1% of your potential market has even heard of you in the first year, let alone tried your product.

You don't need to start with a $1M+ Super Bowl Ad. Find 10 people, call them, learn what they need, educate them about your offer, take their feedback back to your product. The earlier you can start that process the better, without exception.