It's not easy to release something you are embarrassed of.
I was building my first commercial web app and was afraid to launch. I was being precious. I wanted it to be great. Bug free. Fully functional. Beautifully designed. Everything I had done up to this point was to get my product to market, but the final step of launching was eluding me.
The version on my laptop was ‘safe’. Launching it would make my product ‘real’. As I got closer to launching I became racked with self doubt. Is this product actually useful? Who is going to buy this product? Would someone actually hand over their hard earned cash for something so simple?
If you are not embarrassed by your 1.0 you have launched to late.
Once you product is out in the world you get external validation, real user feedback, and can iterate and pivot in an informed way. I knew releasing an embarrassing product was the right thing to do, but in practise launching something unfinished, buggy, or (gasp) broken is one hell of a brave step.
The epiphany that changed it all.
Then one day I had a epiphany. I realised when I launched I would have no users; and no users meant my problems just didn’t matter.
With no users the fact that customers subscriptions are not checked at login doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if the AJAX loading spinner is broken in Safari. It doesn’t matter that a user cannot cancel their account.
This simple realisation enabled me to ‘cut the crap’ and launch my long standing side project within a week.
Realising you won’t have any users at launch makes it impossible to be embarrassed by your 1.0.
With no one to be embarrassed in front of it is damm easy to launch. And when you do you get a sudden motivation surge. Your product is now real. You will start fixing those bugs and prioritising features with an urgency and rationality that just wasn’t possible prior to launch.
But what happens when I get my first user? Aren’t they going to be pissed off?
Maybe. But that will force you into motion. Say your first user complains. How are you going to react? Are you going to wait a week and fix it when you find some time. Of course not. This is your startup. You’re going to do everything in your power to fix their problem as quickly as possible. As a result your customer is likely to be blown away by your level of support and won’t begrudge buying an incomplete or buggy product.
Really? Are you sure? Lets look at this from your the customer’s point of view…
You have just signed up and paid for a product you found which claims to solve your problem. You login and get going and then run into a bug. Hmm. You email support to complain.
‘Support’ being one person with a passion for their first product gets back to you within the hour. It is a personal email from the founder. You are amazed by this service. It took you a week to get a reply from your telephone provider. The bug is fixed the same day and you get given a 1 month credit on your account.
Imagine if you got this service. Would you be pissed off or would you be telling your friends about how one person with a web app offered an astonishing service?
