How to Launch a New Product Without Burning Out Your Team (or Yourself)

Three hard-charging entrepreneurs share their best tips for bringing a product to market in 2025.

- BY KEVIN J. RYAN

So you have a great idea for a new product or service. Congratulations! You've taken a major step, but you're still a long way from getting it out into the world—and even further from doing so successfully. You'll need to build, iterate, time your launch just right—and do all of it without completely burning out your team.

For help in navigating this critical process, Inc. brought together three founders with experience building and launching new products: Andy Dunn, founder of menswear brand Bonobos and the social events app Pie; Shizu Okusa, founder of wellness company Apothékary (which counts Dunn as an investor); and Jaqi Saleem, founder of digital agency Qualified Digital. We began by asking each of them: What have been the most challenging aspects of bringing a product to market in your industry, and how have you persevered?

FOUNDER GROUP CHAT

DUNN We started building Pie in 2020 for one-to-one platonic friendship matching, but candidly we spent about three years wandering in the desert. We kept running into the problem that two people would match, but no one did anything. Then, in 2023, I read this book called Platonic that says the two ingredients in a platonic friendship are running into someone five to 10 times in a group setting, followed at some later point by the mutual disclosure of vulnerable information. So then the job became: How do you build something to help people run into someone five times in a group setting? And that turned into what we're building now, which includes this creator economy that pays people to build communities with a ritual—running clubs, doing arts and crafts, watching sports, playing sports, nightlife.