As you may know, I’m totally immersed in getting TableFlip ready to ship. By some random circumstance, I recently stumbled upon Paul Jarvis’s getting started post about online businesses.

I already read the hip books about startups: Startup Owner’s Manual (meh), Lean Startup (ok), $100 Startup (inspiring), Lean Entrepreneur (meh), Running Lean (good one) – you name it. I still found Paul’s action-oriented collection valuable to get started. It’s the little first steps that matter which I tend to forget sometimes.

With TableFlip, I wanted to know if a visual Markdown table editor would be something people liked. So I put together a landing page for it and asked around. By sheer luck I managed to get 300 subscribers in about a month. I’m excited to show them the first test build. – Sadly, I cannot say that I have any fancy techniques to share. Being connected to other people that love to re-tweet your announcements or post links to their blogs helps a lot. Nothing else has had any effect for me, like, ever.

I posted a link to Joa Allen’s recommendation to get in touch with truly loyal people with a free app MVP that solves 80% of their problems already.

The bottom line of all this is: Just. Do. It. You need feedback, so get something out as quickly as possible. Then you may be able to fend off starvation in the long run.