The magic happens after release
Three real product examples that prove everything before launch is a guess.
Launching your product or next feature feels scary because you feel like you need everything figured out. You are not one hundred percent sure users will love it. You have not covered every edge case. So here is the motivation you might need right now: you don’t need to figure out everything before launch. Release early and learn from your users.
Here is why, with 3 real life product examples.
1. Your highlight might not be the product you planned
No matter how well you plan, real usage will surprise you.
Slack started at Tiny Speck, not as a plan to build a communication tool, but as the internal chat system for a game project called Glitch.
So they pivoted. In 2014, Slack launched as a standalone product. What began as a supporting project grew into a global tool now used by millions of teams.
Sometimes the feature you built to support your actual product is the idea worth building instead.
2. Users invent use cases you never planned
Your product may already have market fit, your users may love it, and yet they will still find paths you did not design. The more they use a product, the more they create workarounds to solve problems you never anticipated.
Early on, Twitter had a strict character limit (140) and was built around short messages. But users didn’t always want to stay short. Around 2014, some users started posting sequences of replies to themselves to write longer thoughts in “tweetstorms”. Marc Andreessen was one of the earliest to popularize this format.
It began as a hack. People manually chained tweets together because the product did not support long form content. As “tweetstorms” became normal, Twitter recognized the behavior and formalized it in 2017 as Threads.
What was once a user-created workaround can turn into a core product feature, because real behavior outgrows original design.
3. Early versions are discovery, not the final product
Duolingo started with an unconventional business model: teach languages for free and crowd-source translations.
As they grew, they realized what users actually valued wasn’t translation labor, but the learning experience itself. The translation model didn’t scale the way the team hoped, so they moved consumer learning to the center and translation to the background.
They refocused the product on learning: gamified lessons, free for all users. That shift turned into massive growth. Today, Duolingo is the world’s biggest language learning platform.
The first version of a product doesn’t have to be the final one. Sometimes it is a probe.
Launch, observe real behavior, and let usage show you what matters.