The mistake isn't releasing something bad. The mistake is to launch it and get PR people involved. You don't want people to start amping up expectations for an early version of your product. The best entrepreneurship happens in low-stakes environments where no one is paying attention, like Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room at Harvard.
Eric RiesWe must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.
Eric RiesIf your goal is to make money, becoming an entrepreneur is a sucker's bet. Sure, some entrepreneurs make a lot of money, but if you calculate the amount of stress-inducing work and time it takes and multiply that by the low likelihood of success and eventual payoff, it is not a great way to get rich.
Eric RiesMost start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.
Eric RiesProducts a start-up builds are really experimentsโฆLearning about how to build a sustainable business is the outcome of those experiments [which follow] a three-step process: Build, measure, learn.โ โ[A startup is] โฆ an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries