How to Launch a New Product Without Burning Out Your Team (or Yourself)

So you have a great idea for a new product or service. Congratulations! You’ve taken a major step, but you’re still a long way from getting it out into the world—and even further from doing so successfully. You’ll need to build, iterate, time your launch just right—and do all of it without completely burning out your team. For help in navigating this critical process, Inc. brought together three founders with experience building and launching new products: Andy Dunn, founder of menswear brand Bonobos and the social-events app Pie; Shizu Okusa, founder of wellness company Apothékary (which counts Dunn as an investor); and Jaqi Saleem, founder of digital agency Qualified Digital. We began by asking each of them: What have been the most challenging aspects of bringing a product to market in your industry, and how have you persevered? DUNN: We started building Pie in 2020 for one-to-one platonic friendship matching, but candidly we spent about three years wandering in the desert. We kept running into the problem that two people would match, but no one did anything. Then, in 2023, I read this book called Platonic that says the two ingredients in a platonic friendship are running into someone five to 10 times in a group setting, followed at some later point by the mutual disclosure of vulnerable information. So then the job became: How do you build something to help people run into someone five times in a group setting? And that turned into what we’re building now, which includes this creator economy that pays people to build communities with a ritual—running clubs, doing arts and crafts, watching sports, playing sports, nightlife. Andy Dunn. Photo: Marshall Tidrick SALEEM: We’re a digital consumer experience agency, so that means everything from connecting people to the brand using data ecosystems to making sense of all these new marketing technologies and creative strategies. So my perspective on bringing a new product to market spans many different industries. OKUSA: We make herbal plant medicine products as a natural alternative to over-the-counter quick fixes. We have about 25 different products and we launch something new just about every month. We’re building out a tongue reading assessment that gives you a diagnosis so you know what herbs to take. You take a quick photo of your tongue, and then we have a database that, combined with AI, can help tell you whether your tongue is inflamed, whether you’re getting enough nutrients, and so on. Because we were direct-to-consumer first, going into the world of technology and using AI has been very new. We’re trying to layer this new innovation on a big set of consumer products. SALEEM: Andy, I’m curious—is there anything you learned from bringing Bonobos to market that you’ve applied to Pie? DUNN: There’s a book, Pattern Breakers, that talks about the inflection points that are required to build something big, unexpected, and enduring. For Bonobos, one of the inflection points 18 years ago was that it was not common for straight men to care about how their clothes fit, let alone how their butts looked in pants. Another was that the premium stretch denim trend had charted new territory on what men were willing to pay for pants, but there wasn’t a comparable product with khaki, corduroy, and wool. And then there was the business model. We were pre-Shopify, pre-Instagram. There hadn’t been many fashion brands built digitally at their core. With Pie, there are a few cultural inflections: Gen-Z is happy to talk about being socially isolated or feeling lonely. The forces of social media and smartphones have moved us away from in-person time more than ever before, so we have an ability to talk about the problem we’re solving. It feels like the frontier. It’s so fun and it’s so hard. SALEEM: Is it harder than it was with Bonobos? DUNN: It’s easier because it’s software instead of retail, but I think the probability of success is much lower. With retail, you may have issues with team, capital, inventory, operations, but what you’re building is here and it’s just a question of how awesome it’s gonna be. With consumer technology, the day-to-day locomotion is easier, but 99 percent of the time you don’t make it. That means it’s even more faith-based, which I love. It requires more spiritual belief that you’re building something that’s gonna work. SALEEM: I love that. You have to have healthy delusions to be an entrepreneur. And you have to find the right balance when building something and deciding when to go to market. A lot of times I see clients want to rush to market with a minimum viable product that is not gonna be the winner. You may get there first, but there are a lot of really amazing products that have been built that didn’t go to market well, and no one ever used them. You need to have a willingness to move that deadline. Consumers are monsters sometimes. They’re vocal, and then you faceplant before you ever had a chance. If there’s a problem that’s really palatable, assume someone else has already tried to solve it. It’s about getting to market in the right way, and then being able to really sustain the momentum you get from doing that. OKUSA: So much of startups is luck, but also being ready for luck. We launched during Covid, when everybody was at home drinking their minds out and started to become curious about health and wellness products. Now the wellness market is growing faster than the GDP. Those weren’t things I thought would happen when we launched, despite my belief that everybody would want clean medicine, and we were fortunate that we were kind of ready for it. You can never time the market, so just be ready when the market is ready for you. BY KEVIN J. RYAN, FREELANCE WRITER @WHERESKR