The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)
kitze.io
kitze.io
I work at a nonprofit and I had done some ABSURDLY SIMPLE data analysis on a relatively annoying public data set to consume. I'd done it for our institution, but it was sort of straightforward to generalize it to any institution for which this would be applicable. The code was... awful. Rather than doing it "properly," since I already had all the code I had written to do the analysis for my institution, I literally just ran it on the entire data set (10GB or so) for every organization that existed and then just put some result file on S3. My "site" would just let folks search for their institution, and present the data with a couple graphs, some nice visuals, and have them print it out. I was ashamed of it in a technical sense.
But I just bought a domain and tweeted at a journalist. Whelp, two weeks later, I had my picture in the city's biggest paper, my org got some positive press, did a service for other non-profits, had folks reaching out to me about jobs, etc. It took SO LITTLE effort, and every instinct I had was that it was bad and I shouldn't publish it. But the reality is I had already done 95% of the work... committing to just do the extra 5% was so hard to do, but in hindsight, so obviously amazing ROI, even if it hadn't gotten the attention it did.
Secondly, I built a reading app for a teacher at my school to let him do an activity where kids would jumble up sentences and paragraphs in order to help them understand transition words. The only reason I agree to try to do this was that I was learning React at the time and wanted to play with the React drag and drop library. After a weekend, I had it essentially working, and it was a success in his classroom. And here, too, it was to be the end of it... but I pushed myself through it, added a simple login mechanic, user account, etc. I had a small technical question as I was wrapping up, and I posted it on reddit. Someone who worked at a nonprofit mentioned to me that the app could potentially qualify for a grant that the Verizon foundation was running for learning apps. I applied... and we got it. The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition.
Really... just ship it!
As programmers we tend to want to generalize a lot, when in fact you can get to 80% of solving the real pain of a task with the first 20% of the work. The rest of the work can usually be done by a human much faster and with more trust than a three-thousand-if-elif-else solution would get.
Is that what the award was...intended for? You maybe don't want to brag about that on the internet.
Or you can simply attribute X% of an existing salary to the grant, and not even bother hiring someone new.
It's relatively easy to spend grant money on anything, as long as it's not in unreasonable amounts.
And I want to add that the same applies if you ship it and it doesn't succeed. Because then you either learn that you're barking up the wrong tree or what to try next.
A decade ago I did a startup with a pal who is an excellent product manager. He had an idea that sounded great. So great that we actually raised some seed money. But when we built a basic prototype, it turned out people hated it. [1] That sounds like a bad outcome. But if it's not going to work, then the sooner you find that out, the less time you waste on it.
So yes, ship early and pay close attention to how people receive it.
[1] more here in a 5-minute Ignite talk he did on it: Here's a 5-minute ignite talk from him: https://vimeo.com/24749599
But on the flip side, if you develop a side project just for yourself, you most certainly learn something. Heck, the author explicitly mentioned learning React Native, which is absolutely great and definitely worth investing time into.
Learning things is valuable in itself.
I also used to think that build it and they will come was a big fallacy, but it's not really. The fallacy is, "build it and the whole world will fight to get what you built". That sure won't happen by itself or by chance.
But if you build something reasonably good, some people will come. That may not be enough for you to make a living out of it, but it will make it worthwhile.
> Learning things is valuable in itself.
From the same author:
> Open source, writing blog posts, and playing with tweaking lint settings and editor themes all day are completely fine until your landlord knocks on your door or you're at the checkout at the grocery store. You're doing a crazy 2-hour commute every day telling yourself "well at least I'm learning a lot about SVG". Fuck that.
https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent
(I am actually, currently learning a lot about SVG and love it; but the quote is right that it's not paying the rent.)
For example, I tried twitter ads for my product [1] and I got zero sales after spending $50.
What are good marketing strategies for niche hardware products?
You can leave your email to be notified when it's back in stock.
At least it works without Javascript.
I find it really, really hard to take good pictures and even harder to take video. I am getting help with that and I hope the situation will improve.
yes, there is a companion app, should I make that more clear?
The contact page is labelled imprint because that's the law here in Germany... I could have an additional contact page though.
The two privacy policies are because one is for visitors of the website and one is for users of my product. Two totally different contexts, and I was unsure how to fuse them. Probably also something I should get help with.
I cut down on the about us section. But I agree this needs some work still...
On clickthru Shopify page, there are some decent photos. But would replace/remove the Amazon text in one of them.
Also would show the back / cord & connector.
Yes, would have apps page with direct links to store.
Re: contact page. Is this actually true? This page for example still says contact when viewing Germany version of page. https://teenage.engineering/contact
Re: privacy: you could have one link, with some way to show both once you get to that page. Few will read this anyway, may as well not clutter home page with 2 links.
Good luck my friend.
That is a Swedish site and as a foreign organisation, they are exempt from the Imprint requirement in Germany.
Imprint is generally something that should be present on a german website, though it isn't really enforced. You could get sued though if you don't have it.
My instant wonder and would be a deal breaker until I found out if the device pulls from the calendar directly or via a proxy you run if it helps any
Going by the language in the privacy policy it’s the proxy method. I’d have to pass, personally. Looks great but I got no use for it if you shut down
Also it’s “sold out” so I assume it doesn’t and won’t exist until you get enough interest. For me this is more an impulse buy, give me a week thinking about it and I’d forget about it completely (then 2 years later I get an email “xyzzy is complete and shipping now!” with no reminder of what it is)
But I want to be upfront about the fact that there are things beyond my control that might force me to shut down some or all functionality. For example, if google shuts down access to the calendar API, the calendar feature will be in trouble.
That said, I would love to have my calendar always just sitting there on my desk. This is the perfect item for anyone with adhd or similar. I would target that niche.
Google Search Ads and Facebook/Instagram ads are seen as more effective in comparison (results are likely higher as Facebook/Meta are relatively better at analytics, so advertisements appear to more relevant people).
In addition, $50 is not a lot to spend on an ad campaign. It generally takes a higher number of advertisement views by the same person (preferably across different websites and channels) to produce an intended result.
I wish there were a scientific study to lean on as a more credible source. I personally don’t have direct experience for budgets smaller than $1,000 a month, back when I did work with some non-profits.
Roughly $100 a month sounds plausibly viable at the lowest uncomfortable end with skill, but you also need that skill in graphic design to make an effective ad, persuasive writing, and a good idea of how to target the right audience. That perspective also costs time to learn from books and/or money if outsourced.
As an example, for my own subscription box service the cost to acquire a customer from YouTube ads was ~$49.
Here are the instructions, so you can see how it works: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...
I was actually thinking about exactly this product earlier this week. I have kids and their schedule is really complicated these days - some days some of them need packed lunches, uniform is different on PE days etc etc. I want to walk into the kitchen and have the details for the day right there. There’s a real use for the product, you need to work on the landing page (I’d suggest considering starting again with a template)
Do you have a template that you think I should use?
And do you know maybe somebody who could help me build a better landing page without costing me all my life savings?
- Webflow: https://webflow.com/templates
- SquareSpace: https://www.squarespace.com/templates
- Shopify: https://themes.shopify.com/
I'd recommend Shopify, and a minimalist, light theme such as the one below, since your product is made of light wood.
https://themes.shopify.com/themes/craft/styles/default?surfa...
But I’ve been wary of using it for the whole website since I didn’t want my whole page structure and content coupled to shopify.
And I didn’t want it all to feel like a shopify store.
But maybe that was a bad priority and I should just get over it.
Thanks for the tip with the theme, btw
As sibling comment says, use a website builder instead. Something like shopify will have everything you need (though I’m not massively familiar with it myself).
Another suggestion I have is to focus on the target audience. I skimmed the doc you linked to about uploading images (couldn’t find any extra docs on the site at a glance btw) and it felt geek heavy in terminology.
The shots of the device look nice, but there’s an app for managing it? Is it easy to use? If I buy this device would my wife ever use it or is it too complicated?
Are you actually making these devices yourself? If I were hand making these my starting point would be to sell to friends so I could iterate on the whole thing. There are a lot of people on here talking about ads and marketing but honestly, hustle is how you get started.
I don't define myself by my design skills so you didn't hurt any feelings :D
I am a bit wary of using Shopify for landing pages because I'm worried it will make it feel even more like a dropshipping enterprise...
But maybe that's the smaller problem if at least my website looks good then!
I was expecting some geocities crap. From what I see, the landing page is clear, concise and shows me the relevant info I'm looking for.
So it has to be something people want. And it doesnt look cool/sleek/exciting enough for people to want it. The bezel is huge, its black and white, and looks overpriced.
Some marketing angles work, but your product has to honestly support them. Ex:
- hackable. Need to show off connection interface, API, some cool project examples. As far as I can tell, LEDs never hurt here.
- sophisticated/elegant.
- useful. Seems easier to use /better than what people are already doing.
- cool. Buys access to a group of exciting people you wouldn't get to meet otherwise.
But the absolute best way to market a hardware product is to stop making it about tech. My dad bought a digital picture frame a while back as a gift. Thats a way easier bar to clear, its emotional, sentimental, symbolic, so the technical execution doesnt need to be as flawless.
1. Is this solving a pain point the user has already?
2. Do they currently have some less-than-great solution in place?
3. Are they willing to pay for something which will solve their problem?
Looking at your product, I see a possible market, but it might need to be tuned (UX and/or marketing) to be successful.
A relative of mine needs 24/7 in-home care. There are a number of people involved and a decent number of Dr appointments etc to coordinate. The people involved with elder care are super low tech, but in her case, a shared visible calendar could be useful.
In general, the products for seniors and/or people with dementia or other disabilities tend to have horrible design and still aren't really suited to physical/cognitive challenges of the users and their caregivers. It's a niche, but one that could use a lot of developments.
I'd say I have two customer groups in mind:
1. Technologically open-minded people who have a bit of money and want an e-paper calendar in their office or for their family. They can buy my e paper screen and set it up with the mobile app in 2 minutes.
2. Developers who want to build their own e-paper application and need a platform to build it on. They can buy my device and use the image-url feature to display their own designs.
Rather than doing online ads I think a promo vid with a progressive looking family / hipsters would be more effective. ;)
Plenty of companies don't do what you say and still become successful.
However, for a pure software solution with little market expertise, I suspect what you are saying is correct because the barrier is so low. If you can "build an app" in a weekend, so can 1000s of other people.
GP asked 'They "can" but will they?'
No, they won't
in reality most people won't do it because they don't know whether it will print money
your comment "If it prints money" doesn't apply in reality and it comes off as if you won this argument to HN readers, which in fact no
I did, but no one came. Marketing feels like an orthogonal skill but can not be overstated enough.
Most markets are large enough to accommodate several businesses. There's really no reason to stop working on something just because you find that there is already someone solving that same problem. Who knows, they will shut it down at some point, or might head upmarket or pivot to a tangential area.
Build something good, that people want, and iterate rapidly as feedback comes in.
You will have a hard time attracting customers as most common marketing channels are very saturated.
*unless you're going to approach it from a unique angle AND have access to a customer base; even then, it won't be a walk in the park
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30427048
I'd say it's even contrary to "laughing at the notion you have to be the first to ship a solution to a problem".
1. Check for open ports, to allow for non-websites (is my ssh server running) 2. icmp ping. (My ssh server is inaccessible. Is my networking/router down, or is it just my computer/program crash) 3. RSS feed for each defined check. This would allow integration with other services like IFTT. 4. Push notifications. First party or via other services; I personally send Pushbullet notifications for stuff via [1] (and currently looking at [2]), previously with npm and bash scripts; Pushover is fairly similar, and I've seen a newish offering called Pushkeep. Generalized webhooks might also work (I believe Pushbullet can be used this way, not sure about others).
[1]: https://github.com/GustavoKatel/pushbullet-cli python [2]: https://github.com/CaptnCodr/pushbullet-cli f#
People give waay too many points to having an original idea and very little to marketing - yet it's the latter that is responsible for the lion's share of any project's success.
Anyways out of curiosity I go to the site and it's a business that's built around a single api call that my organization uses internally. I'm simplifying a little, but I can't believe someone built a business around this thing that, to me, is incredibly simple. (I understand it's more complex than that, and we have entire teams backing the goings on behind this api call, but still). From their "who's using us" block on the landing page they look successful. It's interesting to learn how small businesses can find success in the most surprising of places.
Building successful products is not a matter of “shipping” but also promoting, selling, continually improving, studying user behaviors, providing customer support and engaging potential customers.
Given that the author wasn’t even motivated enough to ship when all these other tasks weren’t even applicable yet, I can’t imagine they would be motivated to do all the work after shipping.
Frankly, this is a good thing. I’ve never been more stressed than when I’ve managed to ship a product, picked up a tiny number of paying customers, and subsequently realized that many hundreds of more hours would have to be poured into the product to make it truly useful.
You slowly start working on it, customers are upset and start churning, and you’re constantly questioning whether it’s worth it anymore to keep pushing.
The most success I’ve ever had was building something I personally thought is fun and interesting with 0 expectations of money or profit, customers be damned.
I’m building https://mintables.club right now, sometimes I pick it up for a few hours on a weekend, often I ignore it for weeks, but I visit it all the time because I love the artwork people upload. There’s tons of competitors that do similar things, even before I started it, but I couldn’t care less.
I've made the mistake of (falsely) convincing myself that what I was building was unique, probably because I wanted it to be true. It was rather stupid, but it's a mistake I will never make again.
Worked on the app for 2-3 months, polishing, coding, learning tailwind and a bit of formal UI design in the process. Kept thinking "It's not ready yet. Just needs this hook into the UI. Needs React. Needs a Rails backend. Needs built in email support"... As you can guess, I never shipped.
Fast forward 7 months later and I found myself browsing the store again, and yep, found TWO applications in the store that solved the same issue I was attempting to solve months earlier. With installs, and reviews! Got pretty down on myself for a couple of days with the author's same sense of happiness, doubt, sadness..
I'm working on another application where the same 'hesitate to ship' tendencies started rearing their ugly heads. I've started experimenting with just setting deadlines for shipping, feature complete, etc.
I'm submitting the app to Shopify today. And no, I don't consider it anywhere near 'ready'.
The second most affirming thing in the world is watching someone make the exact thing you thought of and then selling it.
In fact, putting a price tag on something I was giving away always seemed like step 1 towards no longer caring about it.
As a late comer in the market, you can observe what they miss and compensate their weaknesses. You save yourself time because you can study from them
Me, 3 hours ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351147
I think it is something that is easy to describe in theory, "ship what people want", "pivot quickly" etc. but the truth is most of us think we have solved a problem with our product but as soon as the first customer says, "I would buy it if you changed all those things", we quickly get stuck between, "product market fit" and "I am not solving your problem so let's find the customer whose problem I am solving" to avoid creating something that only customer wants.
My point isn't really about the customer - it's about the startup, and the belief that you'll get to where you want to be eventually. Every single reason a founder can come up with not to be out there selling like "The product isn't finished", "It needs feature X", "It's not fast enough", "It needs better design", etc is wrong. No matter how bad your product is, if it's enough to solve the problem a bit then someone will pay for it. Any improvements you can make after that just increases the number of people who'll buy.
The fun game of running a startup is to make sure you're finding enough customers to make enough money to pay for building new things that enables you to find more customers, until you're big enough to either be self-sustaining or exit.
Startups are about the customer. Every single thing we do, whether related to tech or not, is to find and satisfy a customer's need in order to make it worth their while to give us money for our product. I think we agree on that, but if you ever disconnect your perspective or decisions from the customer, you open yourself up to going off-track.
But don't you run the risk of some potential customer coming, trying it, deciding it's crap, moving on, and now they are burned for the foreseeable future? So, once your product isn't that crap anymore, they won't come back try again, since your brand is burned and has built a "that's crap" reputation?
I think OP's point is that the customer is a better judge of "worth" in the sense of money spent vs pain reduced than you are.
It's impossible to do that worth test yourself. Expose to what you make to customers; see if they vote with their dollars.
I think some people are "maximizers" - They will always do research to seek out the "best" for their given budget for even moderately priced purchases. Engineers tend to fit this profile, so its easy for them to get psyched-out when trying to ship a product.
But people - and businesses - aren't always like this. They will buy what's available and seems to get the job done and seems like less of a hassle.
I worked at a company that at one point had an inferior product to our biggest competitor. We survived and they went out of business. Looking back, one big reason was the fact that we were able to fly under their radar until we had feature parity. We had no fear of shipping early... or shipping half-baked features. I kind of cringe now looking back. And when we finally eclipsed them (as those half-baked features slowly became fully-baked) we were still invisible to them - it wasn't until we started poaching some large accounts of theirs that we finally landed on their radar.
Also, V8 is an incredible piece of technology, and is not that far off being competitive with Rust or C++. In some scenarios GC (by which I mean tracing) can outperform reference counting, or even Rust-style malloc+free. The event loop architecture is also very naturally fitted to user interfaces.
Ignore the HN opinionmongers and build with whatever tools you can work with. You'll be much faster and more flexible, and you'll gain an understanding of what the bottlenecks are, which you can use to do targeted optimisation later on :)
I switched to using Tauri recently though, with the same sort of architecture - Svelte front end, Rust for the heavy stuff, and it’s working out nicely. It’s actually faster than the Mac app in most ways (and to be fair, Electron worked well too, but the installer size and startup time bugged me)
If you don’t like the bloat of Electron and don’t mind dealing with 2 browser engines instead of 1 (Webview2 + Safari), Tauri is worth a look. Doubly so if you already know some Rust. They’re still a bit early days in some respects, so it depends on what Electron features you need.
Plus, there are tons of slow buggy apps that are written in c++, that doesn't guarantee performant software. Electron doesn't need to be slow either, VSCode demonstrates that. Especially for a solo dev or small team, electron is for sure the right choice for a desktop app.
Edit: the reason I tend to dislike electron is that apps don't often follow native UI trends, which is definitely a solvable problem.
The only useful recommendation here is that, when you have some time, and don't have to rewrite an entire app, and if you expect to target the desktop again, you will gain from learning desktop frameworks. But absolutely not now while you are on the middle of something.
Purely from the user perspective I hate electron, because of its RAM usage. The speed argument is a straw man: Of course V8 is fast. And yes, VSCode is a very good IDE. But the problem is real world electron application don't scale down. In my (of course biased) experience even simple electron applications use at least half a gigabyte of RAM, often a whole gigabyte. If you're on a beefy 32gb machine you'll never noticed the difference. But on the 8gb machines most people around me use, these electron apps really take up a huge fraction of RAM. And swapping is definitely noticeable slow, even on SSDs. The "think about the planet" argument comes to play, when I need to upgrade my PC because RAM is the bottleneck. And seriously what fraction of the population even has the knowledge to only upgrade the RAM and not buy a whole new PC.
If I had to advise you personally, I might even tell you to choose electron. But be aware that you are using the "defect" option in the prisoner's dilemma: as everybody around you is choosing the societally harmful option of wasting resources you are at a competitive disadvantage to do the right thing. And also: electron has stolen mind share off of better solutions, so the documentation there is also not in the best place.
And even worse, those people I reach with my argument, and thus put at a competitive disadvantage because they are going the extra mile to do the rights thing, might be those that I want to support the most, because they might be willing to the right (IMO) things at other topics I value as well, like the importance of privacy.
So what is the conclusion? I have no idea how to fix our collective resource waste and it is hard to assign individual responsibility and I'm deeply dissatisfied by the whole situation.
I suspect the difference is because they are responding from a developer's mindset, not a user's. For devs, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps, especially if one already has web experience. Users who dislike Electron are generally seen as a vocal minority (how many people use Slack or VSCode vs non-Electron variants?). But then you have this vocal minority congregating on HN, which is especially focused on speed, and you get comments like the parent linked, dismissing Electron.
The dev point of view is more prevalent in this thread because the linked article is all about how a dev failed to ship an app because they thought it wasn't good enough, which is exactly the problem Electron solves, even if it's worse for the user.
For developers who have never heard of Visual Basic, Delphi, or Free Pascal / Lazarus, Electron really is the easiest way to make desktop apps they know of.
There, FTFY.
To think that devs these days should use any of them is to be tone deaf to how the tech world works these days. Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps.
Libraries and support for what? Betcha 99 percent are for stuff that 99 percent of developers don't need.
> Good luck convincing a dev, much less their boss, to use Delphi to develop their cutting edge desktop apps.
Wasn't this a discussion about the single bloke working on his Minimum Maybe Viable Product? He's his own boss. And if he doesn't want to be convinced to use the best tools for that -- his problem, not mine. I was just correcting your factual error about the easiest way to make desktop apps.
I think the most likely conclusion is that once OSes are guaranteed to have a modern-enough browser engine (this is close to being true for Windows since they introduced WebView2), Electron could update their framework to use the system's native webview (or at least make it available as an option for the developer). This would bring back the problem of having to test in multiple browsers, but I'd rather test against an old version of Chromium, or even Safari, than have to test against the old Edge engine in WebView1.
Edit: Did some more reading, and the way Electron discusses WebView2 doesn't seem to imply that they're interested in integrating with it: https://www.electronjs.org/blog/webview2
But regardless, I think all it would take is someone else making a framework that uses native webviews and implements enough of Electron's APIs/tooling to be close to a drop-in replacement. (Then again, how many people are using Preact?)
Electron works great for some of those use cases.
The other stuff works great for other use cases.
Anyone giving general advice on that is giving bad advice, period.
Enter AWS and GCP. People wonder why businesses seem to burn 10s of millions of dollars by choosing AWS instead of self-hosting, but the personnel and time advantage of offloading to AWS is often worth it.
If you're starting to sell a product, it's really valuable to spend some time thinking about areas in which you behave as a satisficer, a person who's just looking for "good enough". Maybe it's buying rice. Or apples. Or where you fill up your car. Or buying jeans or flatware or toilet paper. There will be some things where your goal is to devote as little time and attention to possible to make the choice. Where you just want it to work adequately for your purpose.
The truth is most people are in satisficer mode for most purchases, if only because we don't have the time to really dig in on everything. Thinking about one's product from a satisficer perspective can be really helpful, as they tend to value things differently. They can also be much easier to sell to and are more likely to stay loyal as long as things are going smoothly.
The ones where I just went and built something and started selling the MVP are making a couple $100/mon.
This thing you are building will prove everyone how smart or [SOMETHING ELSE] you are and the only way to have this happen is to strike at once, shock and awe everyone with your brilliance. You can't simply launch an imperfect product, what that will say about you?
I think at one point he mentioned he stopped listening to learning podcasts when going for daily walks, and instead let his mind rest and enjoy the walk. If anyone feels like they are becoming their own worst enemy with their projects, then that sort of thinking is a good idea.
Having said that, he's also very successful with his other project. So he's a good follow, if you don't mind the trolling about web development ;)
It felt like I got a lot of blank stares when explaining the idea to people, but I went ahead and built a prototype app where you could invite friends to share their location for a limited time, and it would show you where everyone is in realtime on a map. I did a simple backend server to coordinate sending the updates between devices. There was a chat built in so you could tell people your train was running late. I sent it to a few people, we tried it out, I got busy doing other things, and never finished it.
My memory may have distorted the timeline, but it felt like a long time before I saw apps like Glympse, Apple’s Find My Friends, or Google location sharing show up. I could have easily gotten that over the line while it was still my idea. Entirely my fault, though.
I joined shortly after the shuttering. One funny thing was that the company still owned twist.com and would continually get emails for an unrelated sex club, twistsf.com.
I've heard of people in relationships where their SO expects them to always have their Snapchat location on to keep track of them, which is insane to me.
The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme.
I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that.
The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted.
The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.
It's not the point of the story.
I like this site, but the one thing I'll never understand is the outrageously entitled attitudes of so many people when it comes to free content, like fat and delirious blog-reading Ubus.
I created a reddit bot that recommended some words to the users on https://reddit.com/r/whatstheword subreddit posts.
I could've done a lot of things to improve quality, but it looked good as a first draft and shipped it following that philosophy. It turned out to be buggy, and the bot ended up getting banned after an overnight run.
So I think "just ship it" applies only in a large market where you can recover, and losing a few customers is expected.
> Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping
I did get fast feedback and fresh views on what's lacking, and it was a good learning experience. But if I were to do it again, I'd spent 4x the time to include more functionality and do extensive testing.
When you don't have thick skin, you don't ship. Ever.
I think this also plays out when people are always comparing themselves to their competitors instead of just concentrating on what they are doing well. Just because "Big Company" does it, doesn't mean it is worthwhile and that they won't pull it in 6 months when they realise they created something useless!
Am I the only one that actually enjoys development ? I do development for fun in my free time, often with things that are completely throw away.
I LOVE tinkering with silly bots or automations I’ve come up with to solve a problem I’m having for sure! I’d happily chuck away a weekend even if it’s just preliminary work that ends up scrapped. This is fun!
I don’t love everything dev I do for pay, that often comes more under the “well, the bills do need paying..” category
Not because it’s bad or unethical or whatever, don’t get me wrong, it’s just going to be basically the same tasks I did for the last site. Not as fun.
But I'm worried about killing the initial spark of enthusiasm when people try to use it and it's still broken. Or when they start building on it and then I redesign some language feature and their code doesn't work in newer versions.
I wonder if it's a different question for something like a language, or whether I'm just getting sucked into the classic fallacy
For example, you could post a link to your language right here. Not that many people will see it, but some of the ones that do may give you useful feedback and start keeping tabs on the project. There isn't much downside.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23774521
Of its 160 comments, this stands out:
> I'm in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me run that business profitably.
One good strategy I found accidentally through Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) is to launch for free, prioritizing the contact form, and letting people know that you’ll want to make the product paid in the future.
After all the user feedback, the product will probably look very different from the first free version and most people will want to pay for the new polished version. Some will feel betrayed, but as long as you’re keeping the old free version available, you’re not doing anything wrong.
I shared Lunar for free for 4 years before doing a huge paid update with Apple Silicon support and a ton of user feedback implemented. Most people were happy to pay and I’m now doing Lunar full time, earning around $3.5k a month, and the best part is that Lunar v1 only needed about one week of work to see that it solves a real problem.
Even Kitze himself liked it: https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/1464203795030761477
In fact the feature landed in Lunar before Vivid launched and it uses a different approach that increases the brightness for the whole system instead of only for what’s behind an overlay like Vivid does (although the overlay also has its own advantages like being able to only increase brightness for a single window etc. )
It can be activated in the same way as Vivid: increase brightness over 100%
I got contacted by a few VCs, upon realizing my crappy project had some potential, I started working on it again, regularly started contacting the potential users, launched 3 private versions until July 2021. The bunch of users I had liked it but then... I stopped updating it and it eventually sorta died. I just couldn't get out of the private beta in time.
Stopped working on it for ~8 months. Recently got in a startup pipeline program of a large accelerator for this project which made me realize how stupid I am to keep throwing cool opportunities that come my way.
So, now I'm back at it hoping to get out of that grim cycle of not shipping on time. I've got the 2.0 version of my project in works shipping later this month.
And, luckily enough, all those old private users (and new developers I started contacting again) really do want to get their hands on the 2.0 version.
Hopefully, this ends well for a "shipping story".
This sentence is incredibly important. If a MVP is ready in 3 days, then how valuable can that product be?
When literally everyone has access to tools that they believe can result in something marketable in only a few days, then we have achieved the time when nobody makes money from software. Thoughts?
The MVP gives you your first data set to work with.
I know very few people willing to commit to the long journey of making something. Even fewer that will bother marketing it.
There is lots of money in this banana stand!
How long do you think it took to come up with a prototype for Tinder?
A bunch of photos, a blurb of text, geolocation/distance calculation, you like or dislike a profile, and a messaging function.
The slight, simple spin on grindr - showing a stack you HAD to make your way through - instead of grindr's grid - launched them into the stratosphere.
If what you say is true, then the game industry should be dead right now.
However, I'm still working on it and hope to release it in time for a conference that I signed up for, so this will be a 'make or break' year for me.
They were not part of the development and have no financial involvement. Hmm, now that I think about it, I am going to the conference as affiliate of the university... :/
Remember that they are much bigger than you and if there is money involved they may well act irrational, and as a smaller party this can be very unnerving and costly.
Best to make sure that you have it spelled out that the code is yours, stick a big fat copyright sign on top of it and if possible get them on the record that it is clear that the rights belong to you. When in doubt, consult and IP lawyer.
Luckily the situation is in this specific case is that I don't have to worry about it - I'm 100% sure of it. My nightmares come more from the fear that I will finish one day and find out that I took too long and I missed my window of opportunity.
Sure, there could be other reasons this can't be "the saddest" such story, but just being common doesn't logically seem to be one.
I hear you!
Years later, we had another child. Deep into his struggles with talking, and later reading, I finally remembered that unfinished app again. Didn't know where it was, didn't want to restart it, and really the ideal moment for my second son to start using it was 2 years ago, so I didn't even bother.
In 2011 I had an idea for a ceramic coffee mug with a threaded base. then build a screw on base with heating element, battery, and QI charger. Screw the base on, set it on a QI charge pad... voila "always hot coffee". When you're done for the day, unscrew the base, put the mug in the dishwasher. Rinse, repeat.
For a year I researched getting a prototype built, castings, etc. Finally decided to just abandon it. Just drink coffee faster and it won't get cold.
Now I have 2 Ember mugs and an Ember travel thermos. Still can't dishwash it, but dang it's useful.
This was one of mine. I invented it in 1978, when I built a house with a pool in the central atrium. You want that swimming pool to be both indoors and outdoors at the same time. Note the year that "they" invented it.
Pardon me while I just slink off and cry.
I was on HN in 2012. It was not any easier. People said the same thing back then. “Oh, if only I had gotten started in 2005, with DHTML, when things were easier.” “I wish I was paying attention when iPhone app store came out.”
Just because you missed one boat doesn’t mean you’ll miss the next one. Keep an eye out for it.
«History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.»
— Walt Disney
Wtf is that supposed to mean?
* Software "development" skill will become so common and cheap that simple tools won't get any market.
* The market will be dictated by tools instead of code content.
* Language-as-a-service will be a thing, as it allows customers to fill in business requirements AND allows the backing company to perform engineering behind the scene.
You can still release your product and catch up. With a competitor working in the market, it's just like a north star. You can execute as fast as possible to get some customers.
I think the op is intrigued by his ego. The existing product is a good inspiration to valdiate his assumption
Really super good article, give it a read if you haven't shipped because of reasons
No biggy, right? Wrong. I have shipped B2B product in late November. Came in December downtime. Close to 4-5 months wasted because I delayed shipping.
Till day I slap myself in the face for that.
There is now. https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick
I just didn't care and at some time just deleted it (angering many friends). No regrets, though. I was definitely not ready to take the idea any further, back then.
Ideas are what has gotten humanity this far and I am happy to see technological advances, in product that makes me happy, that come from our Haxor within, so to speak.
It is a big ladder to climb between Idea and Product, one step at a time is the only way.
How would one possibly eat an elephant?
Tools are required, for catching, skinning, cooking blah blah... and help from folks can be another tool within your toolbox whilst you fly solo dev.
Is the statement that the elephant is now too big to catch? It is hard to find other hungry folk to help hunt a big thing? Where is the hunting ground? Where do you get helping from other hungry solo devs to kill an elephant with only your inputs of skill, effort and time?