Erik Ries offers some good advice on his blog Lessons Learned regarding timing your start-up PR and marketing campaign launch. Reis is a founder of IMVU and an advisor to Kleiner Perkins, and serves on the boards of a number of technology startups including pbWiki, Bunchball, FooMojo, Causes and KaChing. BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech in 2007.   Ries explains why launching  too early without product readiness may be a big mistake:

We really did it well, with a great PR firm and great coverage. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, the works. But it turned into a crushing defeat, because we couldn’t capitalize on all that attention. The product didn’t convert well enough, the mainstream customers we were driving weren’t ready for the concept, and the event fed expectations about how successful the product was going to be that turned out to be hyper-inflated.

Read the rest of the story at Don’t Launch.