Ask HN: Not Ready. Now what? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Not Ready. Now what?

7 pointsbmelton9 comments

To make a very long story as short as I can, we were targeting November 'launch an app' month to get Plum out the door, but it looks like if we really really push for that, we'll be pushing out some crap.

What we have is great. Awe-inspiring. The tech behind Plum is amazing. But, it's still another few days off, at least, and we're boostrapping it on nights and weekends.

What would you do, if you were about to potentially miss a deadline? Ship anyway? Ship in a very limited beta? Just let the deadline slip quietly and release as soon as we're comfortable? Something else?

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Don't ship something that's not ready. If you have a subset of the product that makes sense to release, release it, but most likely releasing a subset that's not designed to be used standalone will leave you with a product that has some glaring holes and inconsistencies.

If it's going to have bugs, frustrate customers, or worse yet, lose their data, sit tight and polish it until it's ready. If people are waiting for it, send them a clear update saying that you know that they are waiting, that you are working on the final updates, and that you expect it to be ready at such and such date. Your customers will appreciate the transparency, and won't mind waiting a bit longer if it means they get a product that's a joy to use.

This doesn't apply if the customers are waiting for a beta release - in that case, go ahead and release, just make sure to remind them that the product is in beta, and therefore bugs are to be expected.

So what you have is already "great," "awe-inspiring," and "amazing" yet if you ship it now instead of a few days from now it will somehow be "crap?"

I doubt that what you have is crap. I also doubt that what you have inspires awe. You're putting too much pressure on this "launch." It's just the first of hopefully many public or semi-public iterations. No one is going to care anywhere near as much as you do about this. Just get it out there, consider it a success if you pick up a few early adopters, and iterate.

The tech is awesome. A lot of what the user can't see is just plain sweet. This is mostly leveraging a lot of other people's elegant tools (CeleryQ, RabbitMQ, Mongo, etc.)

The front end is missing a lot of obvious pieces which have placeholders. It looks like Franken-App (or Franke-App's monster, if you prefer).

You're 100% right, to be sure. Nobody else will care the way that we do, but I know that I personally find it hard to revisit something later if it's really bad at first.

I'm in the same position you are in... except was hoping to get word out and invites out at an event on the 1st. Just going to have to bite the bullet and let it slip. The tech is good but still has bugs. Not every hole has been plugged. Forgetting that code hasn't been optimized and speed is suffering, I just don't feel comfortable releasing a private beta yet. Next BIG launch target is in January and I'll open up an extremely limited private alpha/guinea pig site in the meantime.

I'm of the opinion that it doesn't mater how many (or how few) features you have, or even if what you have works, but what is paramount is that the UX is perfect. Not a single thing can be wrong with what you release. Anything that is will just scare away potential customers and give yoyu a rep for building crap.

I put up a landing page, which probably hasn't generated any buzz, but has allowed me to capture a very healthy amount of emails.

I don't necessarily share your 'perfect or nothing' mindset for launch, but there are a lot of features that we're looking to throw out for launch, and can safely push back to a later date.

Most of what I'm calling 'crap' is just incomplete though, and some of these things can be pulled together quickly... others, not so much.

Good luck on yours as well. I look forward to seeing it.

I'm in the same boat, ish. My problem is that I haven't put as much effort into my november project as I'd like. On the plus side I've learned loads:

Why being a single founder is hard (2 people means you both have to be demotivated in order to fail, which is twice as unlikely as just one person)

Why audience is more important than product (I've still not written a line of code, but I'm getting relevant traffic to my "product"'s homepage through some blog posts. I see a half-popular website as more valuable than a half-written app)

That these things are hard to keep focused on. I've not worked on my project for about a week and a half and that's put a huge dent in my deadline-hitting ability.

And a load of other stuff which I'll probably blog about this week.

As long as you have one core feature ready, I think you should launch it! I really doubt anybody else care that much about the product other than yourself. Launch it! If it is good, feedback will start coming in.

a half baked cake is not delicious. might as well finished it fully before shipping it..

take the middle road. Jumping to launch a broken product isn't good, but waiting for perfecting isn't either. If it is workable, you hit a minimum feature set or anything, launch!

Also, do you get a prize for launching in Nov?

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