It can be scary to share your thing with the world.

That's the moment of the truth: when the idea is ground truthed, and shown to be viable or non-viable.

The longer you've been working on the idea in a cave, the more likely the idea is non-viable.

Perhaps you've lost touch with the ground truth as you iterated in the darkness.

It's much better to have your thing interact with the ground truth early and continuously.

When you're in the cave, the value of each additional unit of discussion diminishes logarithmically.

It gets increasingly disconnected from the ground truth.

The quality of the insights based on the limited data already brought into the discussion from outside the cave improves slower and slower.

Another unit of time spent talking about information you've already collected is much less valuable than a unit of time of sourcing new disconfirming evidence by getting more information from outside the cave, or even better, sharing the idea in the outside world and seeing if it's viable.

It can be very scary to share your idea with the outside world, since it might fall on its face and die.

But it doesn't have to be that big of a deal.

There are often ways to float trial balloons to get feedback before everyone sees it.

Conceptually, you're trying to minimize the chance that someone who uses it has such a bad time they never use it again.

One way to minimize that is to have the quality be perfect… hard to do when working in a cave.

Another way is to control your audience so only a small number of resilient people use it.

The default way to do that is to pick your audience and tell them you think they should try it.

The other way to do it is to have a gauntlet that leads to motivated users self-selecting.

E.g. have minimal documentation, make the tool look a little sketchy.

The users who are willing to put up with the inconvenience in the first steps will be more likely to be resilient to a broken experience in the actual product.

And then if they like it, you can ramp up your outbound marketing, and reduce the broken glass to expand to a larger audience.

You get the benefit of the upside if it's good, and self-capping downside if it's not.

This lets you sample how possible users in the ecosystem feel, sensing ahead of time if there is a wave to catch before putting yourself out there.

Another example of self-capping downside is when there's some high-stakes decider who needs to weigh in.

For example, an investor you want to invest, or your superior in an organization who will decide if the project goes forward.

If you go in and formally have them weigh in and they don't like it, it could be game over.

But imagine that that decider is someone who likes you well enough that they're willing to meet with you 1:1 well before any formal meeting.

In the meeting, you ask for mentorship, e.g. "What kinds of things would let you know that an idea was ready to go."

This is effectively a trial balloon. If it goes well, you keep pushing the advantage, and maybe even lead to a formal-ish decision in that meeting.

If it doesn't go well, that's OK, you were just asking for mentorship anyway, and you can pull back on that line of discussion as soon as you hit bumps in the road.

Just make sure you have enough enjoyable / useful agenda items to run out the clock without them feeling like it was a waste of time.