Fear of not shipping | Hacker News Reader

Fear of not shipping

joel.is

14 pointsjoelg877 comments

I have the same issue when publishing blog posts. I disagree that you should always ship without delay. Using your blog posts as an example, I often do the same and put off publishing. Not for the reason that it could be better or it's perfect. Mainly for the reason that I want to make sure it expresses my thoughts/ideas/opinions correctly. I think this also applies to startups, sometimes the things you ship are an expression of something about your business. It is important to take the time to express your business in the way you intend. An author will still take time to edit and reword a book. The shipping part just means don't let it get to the point where you don't do anything with it. Not that you should never hesitate.

I agree with main point that shipping is the most important thing you can do. And you should always ship what you have done. In the case for startups it can easily be referred to as shipping in stages. Not delaying shipping because your product isn't fully built, and then shipping the rest in small chunks over time. You shouldn't have a fear that causes you to wait until your product is complete and perfect to ship.

But just shipping isn't the correct solution either. It's a case of balance, you have to find the right one. There is no hard answer to what that is, it's down to you. But as the post says don't let that stop you from shipping anything at all.

I doubt that the intention of the post was to suggest you should just ship anything. But that is a prime example of sometimes taking the time to express yourself correctly. If the author didn't just click the ship button, and took a little bit of extra time he may have expressed that part the way he intended.

That's a very interesting point. I agree it is important to take care that you are expressing things in the way you intend, and also that the important thing is to not let it get to the point where you don't do anything with it, i.e. you don't "ship".

There is a very interesting comment on the blog:

  There is a compound effect of not getting started. The longer something takes to 'get out there' the higher the expectations are of the user, and often the owner. 
  The mentality goes like this "it's taken 1 year to build, therefore we've got to make sure it's perfect", this delays things further.
  As long as you aren't releasing quickly as an excuse for accepting a product, service or blog post which is poorly thought out, 'ship quickly' is a great mentality to go by.

I think that's a key point to think about with the whole "be sure you are expressing yourself as you intend", since whilst I agree it's important, I also think that the key is to make sure you ship, and I definitely think that the longer you delay the more likely you are to think it needs to be to a very high standard.

I'd love to hear what do you think about this quote from LinkedIn Founder Reid Hoffman:

  "If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late."

Although I guess being embarrassed is not quite the same as expressing yourself in a way you don't intend.

Awesome post Joel. Exactly my feeling about shipping and doing it early. One of the things I have also observed is that oftentimes you don't know how more "minimum" you can actually get something to work out still. This is my next step in line of this process. Not only having a mindset to ship early, but also getting a feel of when the "early" is reached. More often than not it is earlier than you think!

Yes, that is another great point. I'm also fascinated by that question: how minimal should you make something.

I've found, and indeed I mentioned it in the post, that with each new startup, I aim for more minimal. Even with the latest startup I think I could have launched it perhaps even sooner. So as you say, it is almost always earlier and more minimal than you think.

Once you're done with the fear of shipping, you may move to the fear of shipping something, even minimal, that people aren't ready to pay for, or something that will grow sooo slow you will have to kill it (not speaking of blog posts though!).

What of if you cannot ship alone? I can ship my blogposts alone. If a line of code has to be written by someone else, I can only hope. What do you think about that? I am working on having my initial product less dependent on something beyond my control

That's a very interesting question.

I think there are only really two options:

  - Ship what you can
  - Learn to ship what you can't

Perhaps a third - find someone to help you ship what you can't.

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