What's the worst advice you've ever gotten about launching a product?
"Just launch. The market will tell you what it wants."
That advice sounds brave. It sounds like action. It is wrong.
The market does tell you what it wants. It tells you by ignoring you. By not buying. By churning. By the time you hear that feedback, you have already spent months building, thousands of dollars, and a lot of goodwill with your team.
The research backs this up. A study of over 80,000 new product introductions found that roughly one in four new products failed to survive one year after launch, rising to around 40% after two years . In the consumer goods industry specifically, an astonishing 25% of new product launches tracked in key categories during 2023 and 2024 were already inactive by the end of 2024 .
But here is what the failure data actually says.
What really kills launches
The number one cause of product failure is not bad execution. It is not lack of funding. It is "no market need." That accounts for 42% of failures . Almost half. People build things that solve a problem that does not exist, or that nobody is willing to pay to fix.
The rest of the breakdown: running out of funding (29%), unclear company strategy (23%), team or cooperation issues (23%), and poor product design or UX (17%) . Funding and strategy problems are real, but they are downstream of the market empathy problem. A product that genuinely solves a validated need is easier to fund and easier to align a team around.
Even products that win awards fail at an alarming rate. One study found that half of the "Product of the Year" winners from 2018 could no longer be found online for purchase. Approximately one in three winners from 2019 and 2020 were also not available . Winning a badge does not predict survival.
A broader analysis of over 123,000 products that launched online between January 2023 and June 2025 found that nearly 30% had already disappeared from the digital shelf . Kantar's data suggests that almost two-thirds of new product launches are dead or dying by the end of their second year . Less than 2% of new products meet the fundamental criteria for distinctiveness, relevance, and endurance.
Why "just launch" is dangerous
The "just launch" advice ignores that launches fail in predictable ways. Four barriers show up again and again.
First, nobody notices. You launch emails, videos, maybe a tradeshow. But your prospects do not respond. Not because they are rejecting you. Because they are not paying attention at all .
Second, no clear difference. You catch some attention. Then they hear another vendor make the same promise. And another. Soon your message is lost in a sea of sameness. Buyers default to the lowest price or walk away .
Third, buyers do not trust you yet. They have been burned before. They are skeptical. They are not ready to commit.
Fourth, no one takes action. You did everything right. But there is no movement. The funnel is full. Progress is slow.
"Just launch" does nothing to solve these barriers. It just launches you straight into them.
What actually works
Before you build, validate the problem. Not the solution. The problem. Talk to buyers, not just users. The people who control the budget. Ask them what they need to say yes.
Before you launch, align the team across engineering, marketing, sales, and support. NPI fails in silos. Engineering builds something production cannot make economically. Marketing promises a ship date logistics cannot hit .
Before you go to market, make sure your product data is ready. The gap between "product is ready" and "product data is ready" is one of the most common causes of delayed market entry and incorrect listings at launch .
During launch, stop talking about your product. Start talking about their problem. When a product is positioned by its features, it sounds like noise. When it addresses a pain point, especially one that is urgent or expensive, it gets noticed.
After launch, measure the right things. Kantar's data shows that new products that decline in their second year cut their advertising support by half compared to those that maintain or grow sales . The launch is not the finish line. It is the start of the real work.
What I learned from ignoring this
We built a feature set that zero customers asked for. Six months of work. Zero signups. The cost was not just the engineering time. It was the features we did not build. The bugs we did not fix. The customers we did not retain.
The advice to "just launch" sounds bold. But launching something nobody wants is not bold. It is expensive.
What I am curious about
What is the worst advice you have received about launching? And what did you learn from ignoring it or following it?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
rankfender.com
Show value first.
Replies
This is one of the more honest pieces I've read about launches. Most people won't admit the "no market need" failure until long after the money is gone.
The bit about talking about the problem rather than the product — that one hit home. It sounds obvious. It isn't.
I'd add one thing: even when the need is real and urgent, you can still fail by moving too fast. Earning the right to solve a problem takes longer than most founders want to admit.
We have something launching in the mental health space next week — will share more then. This post came at the right time.
How much of this came from your own experience with Rankfender?
Rankfender
@zhanna_ritchie Thank you. That means a lot, especially coming from someone about to launch in a space where trust is everything.
You are right about moving too fast. Speed is not the same as momentum. You can ship quickly and still arrive nowhere if you have not earned the right to be in the room. Earning that right takes patience. Patience is not popular. It is just true.
The problem vs product thing sounds obvious. But most founders violate it within the first two sentences of their pitch. "We are a platform that does X" instead of "This is the problem we saw, and here is why it hurts."
Most of what I wrote came from watching other people fail. But the part about launching something nobody wanted? That came from Rankfender. We launched without a free tier. Big mistake. People signed up, poked around, and left. They did not have time to see the value. We were talking about our product. Not their problem.
The mental health space is hard to launch in. The buyers are cautious. The users are vulnerable. The trust bar is higher. That is not a disadvantage. It is a filter. The teams that clear it build something that lasts.
What is the one thing you have learned about earning trust that you wish you knew earlier?
@imed_radhouani The trust bar being a filter — that reframe is genuinely useful. I'm going to borrow it.
The one thing I wish I'd known earlier: trust isn't built in the pitch, it's built in what you do before the pitch. The clinical credibility, the research, the years of framework development — none of that felt like "trust building" while we were doing it. It felt like doing the work. But it's the same thing.
People can tell the difference between a team that arrived at a problem and a team that lived with it long enough to understand it properly. That difference is hard to fake and impossible to rush.
Looking forward to sharing what we've built next week.
Rankfender
@zhanna_ritchie That is the part you cannot accelerate. Living with the problem. You can read about it. You can interview people about it. You can study competitors. But you do not really understand until you have been stuck in it yourself.
The teams that succeed are not the ones with the best pitch. They are the ones who have been in the dark, felt the frustration, tried the workarounds, and realized nothing worked. That is not a credential. It is a scar. And scars are hard to fake.
The difference between arriving at a problem and living with it is everything. Arriving means you can explain it. Living with it means you can feel when an answer is wrong, even if it sounds right.
The filter is real. Mental health is one of the hardest spaces to earn trust. The teams that clear it are the ones who do not try to bypass the work. They just do the work and let the trust come.
Looking forward to seeing what you have built. Drop the link here when you launch.
Really glad you mentioned this. While overplanning is a trap, having some baseline validation before launching would dramatically change the odds, even if it's just a few conversations with potential users first.
Rankfender
@ahana_gandhi Exactly. Baseline validation does not need to be expensive. It does not need to be a survey of 1,000 people. It just needs to be honest.
Three conversations with potential buyers can change your roadmap. Ask them what they have tried. Ask them why it did not work. Ask them what they would pay to fix it. If they cannot answer those questions, you are not ready to build.
The mistake is not skipping formal market research. The mistake is skipping any research at all.
What is the smallest validation you have done that saved you from building something nobody wanted?