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Paul Graham explains his rule of thumb for when to launch your product

January 08, 2025

“The risk of launching early is not as great as the risk of launching late… So you’ve got to have a good rule of thumb about when to launch. And my rule of thumb is launch as soon as you have a quantum of utility, which means as soon as there’s one person in the world who is glad you launched because now they can do something that they couldn’t do.”

He continues:

“If you have something that if you launched it, no one would be happy, then you’re not ready to launch… [But] if there’s 10 people who are super excited and nobody else cares, totally launch. That’s perfectly fine. That’s great.”