Given enough time, money, and effort, we can build most solutions we set out to build. The bigger risks aren’t technical risks, but customer and market risks.
The 10x model automatically works to help you prioritize your risks in the right order.
If you go and launch your product to everybody, you take on all the risk upfront. It's better to do a staged rollout.
Go to your customers and say: "I am going to rollout my product in 4 stages"
I'm going to interview 100 of you and handpick 10 of you. Those are going to be my early adopters. Start creating value for your friends first. (It also has a psychological side effect when you limit the number of seats. It creates scarcity. People start asking "Why I am not one of those 10?").
Once I can get to 10 happy customers, I would then level up to aim for 100. Now I'm going to have to do different things. I have to start investing in channels and increasingly more scalable channels as I go from 100 to 1000 to 10000.
There's a lot of customer and market risk in the beginning but over time it becomes more technical. Risk is a lot qualitative when you only have 10 customers. You can talk to everybody. But once you've got hundreds of customers you get to rely more on analytics and metrics.
Identify early adopters and start to rollout in batches. Don't rollout to everyone. Do a private launch. Don't go and try to impress everyone. Get your best early adopters to use your product. And if you can create value for them, they also give you testimonials, references, and case studies, which will help the latter customers who also come in and build trust in you.
Note: free users don't teach you anything because they are not paying money, they ask for a lot of things. It's more headaches and more servicing and things go slower.
A 5x launch is actually harder in the short-term than a 10x launch.
Your minimum goal cannot change. The only thing that you do with 5x versus 10x is to change the slope of the curve. This makes the number of customers twice as much in year two and four times as much in year one.
It's better to start slow to avoid things like discounting, getting too many customers that a small team can handle, more technical issues etc.