On Saturday I elected to leave a 1 1/2 year old start up I joined 5 months ago as a Consultant where I then became COO and then President. It’s a company with a great product but questionable management and startup experience. My time with this young company underscores a previous experience and lesson and would like to share with other entrepreneurs. It is about getting your product to market. When you have a unique product one of the most important business objectives one can have is to “get the product to market”.The product does not have to be perfected before it it released. I am stating the obvious, but when bringing a totally unique product to market the uniqueness of the product IS your competitive advantage and any delay or time wasted in getting it into the hands of your potential customers just gives your competitors time to get theirs there first. The mistake I have seen made time and again by many entrepreneurs is the “redesign and “delay” tactic. Rather than getting an EXCELLENT product to the market, they become so focused on getting the “perfect” product ready for market that precious time is wasted and either someone beats them to punch by getting a similar product out before them or worst yet, it never goes to market.Your goal is to create, develop and market an ‘excellent’ product that attracts customers and captures market share, quickly. In getting your product to market you gain first mover advantages and give customers the opportunity to give you valuable product feedback that may actually help you create new features or enhancements to improve the product even more. The second advantage is that you can establish Momentum, a critical competitive advantage. Momentum makes it very difficult for any new-found competitors to over take you or become number 1 in your market segment. What you hope to establish is that if they want to be number 1 in the same space, it would be smarter (for them) to buy you out than to compete against you (time and money). What I experienced with this start-up is a CEO/ Visionary stuck on (at least) two things: First- Product Perfection - the need to have the absolute perfect product before launching into the marketplace - manifested through the “R&D” I mentioned earlier - finding any little thing “wrong” to cause delay for “just one more week”. The second - Fear of Failure or Rejection -this one actually drives the first. It comes from a CEO/Visionary whose vision has gathered people, energy, 24/7 effort and time (and some times even investment from others) around a new business concept or vision and now it is coming down to a “time of reckoning”. Not every visionary/entrepreneur fall prey to this, but many do. They realize that as they prepare to launch their product to the market they are going to find out if they actually “have something”. Fear of failure or less than spectacular results sets in concerning their “baby” and they begin to knowingly or unknowingly delay (sabotage) their own product launch with “must” changes, only to be comfortable with remaining in the “development” M.O.. It is unfortunate to see this happen let alone experience it. To the entrepreneurs of the world, be sure you don’t fall prey to product perfection or fear of failure but look forward to your launch and feedback from the early adopters and weigh their input to redesign a potentially enhanced product in Version 2.0.