Hacker News Reader

Comment by meric | Hacker News Reader

I've been working on my project for a few weeks. I just bought a domain for it today. I'll wait till it's finished in a few more weeks before shipping it. It's only hosted at my computer at the moment. I've finished most of the functionality but the app needs data to make sense to users and I still need to collect that. So am I telling myself a lie? I should release now?

View on HN

First, see bennesvig's reply.

Here's something that may be helpful... when you're thinking "I can't ship yet" then make a list of what's stopping you. You should do this for a number of reasons, of course. But once you have a list, you can visit each item and ask yourself if that's really stopping you from shipping or if you're just temporizing. Some items might be nice to have but not really required. Others might have solutions that you haven't thought of yet because you haven't been thinking about it at all before you put it on a list and had to face it squarely. To sum up, for each item: 1) Is it really stopping you? and 2) Is there something to be done about it today or this week?

I guess the 'release early' mantra is relative. I've created a poll the other day about how many lines of code people's MVP contains:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2370439

I guess sometimes 'release early' means that 'only work on the first public version for half a year instead of years'. I am basically working on something which is kind of competitor to MS Access. Even if I ship early I cannot ship anything 'interesting' under 15.000 lines of code.

You're turning it into a false dichotomy (of never ship vs always ship all the time). The point is more that you should be finishing stuff (including shipping), instead of starting projects and leaving them half-done forever.

I took it more to mean that you should be actually producing a product rather than talking about it.

Then collect the data and ship. Just don't let the few more weeks become a few more months.

I'll probably write it up later, but I've been letting people sign up for my product before I've considered it MVP'ed. I find it helps a lot, I hold myself to a higher standard (downtime is not longer acceptable, I have dozens of users) and it helps you focus on the right features -- it's not easy enough to use yet, and I need to work on that before adding more cool features.

You're not the target audience of the article. It's referring more to the people who spend all day hanging out at the trendy SF cafes and going to all the "networking events", waiting around to catch the eye of anyone who works near Sand Hill Road, instead of actually getting shit done.

It sounds like you're getting shit done.

I used to be one of those people, so it really stings. I remember even back then reading stuff like this and thinking it wasn't talking about me. Self-delusion can be a strange thing.

But then I buckled down, read informative technical books (i.e. NOT Godin, the OP, etc) and started producing instead of consuming. Evidenced by the fact that I read this article and am writing a reply, some days are better than others. :)

I don't think I'm self-deluding myself any longer, but who knows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com