Putting your heart and soul into a new product or service can be one of the most exciting aspects of being an entrepreneur. Seeing your idea flourish before your eyes can be fantastic and we can all get carried away at times. It can be hard to know when to stop making improvements and endless tweaks and let it out into the world.

After the fun of getting the idea together, doing the market research, validating your potential customer base and crunching the numbers, releasing your product or service into the marketplace can feel terrifying. Not only have you spent a great deal of time, effort and money on preparing, but there will no doubt be some of your ego wrapped up in it too. What if the market research wasn’t thorough enough? What if there’s a whole load of criticism? Have I completely missed the mark? Take about stressful!

With all those questions in mind, we all want to make sure that what we take to market is perfect in every way. This can cause delays, friction with partners and wasted money and time. At some point, you are going to just have to get it out there! Only by releasing it can you gain valuable feedback from people who are using your product or service the way that it should be used. The feedback that they can provide can be invaluable to any new product as it will allow you to make constructive tweaks, not for the sake of your ego, but that will genuinely improve the product or experience for future customers.

They say you can only launch something once, and perhaps that was true in the past, but in the world of startups that we live in now, the public are used to seeing products being changed after launch to better serve the customer base. And launching once, perhaps with tweaks afterwards, is a lot better than never launching at all because something is not quite right!

With us on this episode of your favourite small business podcast is Jaime Jay. Jaime is going to take us through his experiences of launching Podcast Professors and share his tips for anyone stuck at this particular bottleneck at the moment.

Issue Challenged in this Small Business Podcast:

When do you know when your product is ready to launch?

About Jaime:

Jaime Jay is a podcaster, entrepreneur and WordPress marketing expert. When he’s not discussing the latest in online entrepreneurship on his show, Stop Riding the Pine, Jaime is hard at work sharing his experiences and expertise with the world at Podcast Professors. The site provides action plans, tutorials and advice for those new to the world of podcasting. The site also has a vibrant community of likeminded podcasters willing to help one another with their podcasting issues.

Jaime also runs Slap Shot Studios, a WordPress marketing company that provides total solutions to those in need of high quality WordPress designs, tailored content and promotion.

Actionable Tips:

* Understand that your project will need tweaks and adjustments. You can’t ignore feedback that could help the product and you need to address bugs and issues as they arise.

* Avoid paralysis by analysis. Don’t wait for your product to be perfect or you might never launch it and receive the valuable feedback that could help the product evolve.

* Get feedback from your friends and family. They will be the most honest with you and they will help you learn how to clearly explain your product to people outside your business or industry.

Top Quotes:

* “Making a change to an existing solution can be challenging because it depends on how big of a change it is. It could extend the timeline of when we want to finish something, so we do take into consideration all the enquiries and questions but we don’t act on every single one of them or else we would never be able to release a product.”