The Fear of Shipping (2012) | Hacker News Reader

The Fear of Shipping (2012)

smileykeith.com

72 pointsingve44 comments

Most likely reaction to shipping your project for the first time: crickets.

I don't say this to be disparaging. We set up mental milestones that really aren't important to the rest of the world. What is really important is your commitment over time - shipping again and again. Quality emerges over many iterations.

That's what I realized when I was debating whether to attempt yet another Doom port to some exotic device.

Maybe 10, 20, or 200 tops will ever actually see it. Fewer would attempt to play it.

It would by all accounts be a private and personal challenge, or an excuse to have some "cool" factor on the resume/portfolio.

Most people can easily sink inordinate amounts of time into a thing that they also expect will receive a proportional level of exposure AND either admiration or utter public scrutiny. But the reality is it's often none of the above. Just another project pushed into the ether.

It's good to talk about.

  Always be shipping. Find small things to ship, features to celebrate.

This is the advice given for startups, especially looking for product-market fit. Can't get feedback if you don't ship. Can't have people you didn't think to show celebrate you for meeting their needs--if you don't ship.

Repeated exposure is also good, for eventual trialing and adoption.

You can ship small, and announce to small, targeted communities. Or share with your own metadata about link source.

EDIT: Poster's account is from 4/12/12, and date of blog publishing, are both 12/12/12.

Shipping stuff is one of the most important skills to learn in the early days of a career, FAANG is a good place for that. I worked with people, and orgs, who learned to ship and those who didn't. The latter are at best a pain to work with, at worst a net negative for whatever work is being done.

After several years dabbling with back-end languages and computer theory in my free-time without shipping anything, I have been surprised very recently by how much I enjoy learning front-end, especially for this. I can ship very small snippets of personal projects and get a real world feedback quite easily, which in turn fuel my motivation to keep coding. I feel it will be very fun and rewarding to add my back-end knowledge as soon as I will be able to.

So I second the great conclusion by the author : find stepping stones to ship frequently (and keep contact with potential customers), even if it is not exactly in your favourite field.

This visual feedback is exactly the thing that hooked me on coding in the first place, seeing your seemingly abstract C code turning into a cute "hello world" executable files.

Specializing in web front-end stuff was an obvious logical continuation of that, thank you for reminding me :).

Oh I'm guilty of this. So many projects that were not launched. And the easy default for us (developers) tends to be coding & building features. But even if you ship, you have to continuously ship. And by shipping, I mean, you need to continuously tell the users. You ship it, you announce it, you need to market it, send out newsletters, feedback, improve, email the users again, cold-reach-out to other users who might be interested, and on and on we go. This is why it's difficult. Are you ready to put in as much work into these non-technical work? I wasn't and I was certainly unaware.

I don't want to be too harsh because I am guilty of the same thing. The author is fearing shipping because he doesn't have customers. He is scared of failure. If he validated and found customers beforehand, he would be excited.

Another guilty party here chiming in. Building software and getting it ready is the easy thing and only about half the journey.

A fear of failure, not knowing the next steps and not having the skills to do those steps keeps us in chains.

The worst part, when we do acquire those skills, we realise how difficult it actually is "shipping" and may decide it's not worth it for a particular project.

Validate without shipping anything, how? Surveys

This is something I have been thinking a lot about. I still don't have a definite answer. For me, I joined a company to learn about the B2B space because I had a idea that catered to that market. Through this experience, I was able to cross out a lot of wrong assumptions I had about the space. I still don't know if my revised idea works, but it definitely helped me from pursuing the wrong one.

Even if every product you ship lands with a thud, if you keep it up you'll soon have a reputation as someone who ships.

The author of the article (which is from 2012) has been a developer at a well-known rideshare company since 2015; So I guess he ships very frequently now. Nice example of living one's message.

I think the article is more about personal projects than what he does professionally. I write software professionally too and have shipped (or contributed to shipping) plenty of projects, but also have a lot of (more or less completed) personal projects that never saw the light of day...

I was guilty of that. For my last project I just decided to build it in public over the weekend while tweeting about it. I built https://2markdown.com (convert any website into markdown, useful for LLMs/chatGPT) and it now has about 100 users since launching two weeks ago. Just ship it ;) I actually got integrated into langchain 3 days after launching. Costs: 0, revenue: > 0.

I also built newsletterify.com (newsletter reader) which I didn't launch for almost a year. No build in public, no small releases, just big things. Cost: almost 50 bucks a month, revenue: 0.

Wow brilliant idea how is the process for integrating to Langchain does it work for paid?

Thank you!

Sorry, I'm not sure I got you. You mean whether it's possible to integrate paid solutions into langchain? In that case: yes. But I'm not sure you can just propose that you're integrated into that. Not sure what their philosophy is on that. I didn't have anything to do with the integration actually.

One of the things I realised after shipping my app, was that almost everything I was worried about before the launch was completely irrelevant. It's quite nice being in a bubble and just continuing to make something you like working on, I actually really miss that feeling, but the reality is most of what you make will have to change as soon as people use it.

Before shipping, I had no sense of how large the landscape was and how much noise there is - the trickiest part for me was getting people to see it.

How did you get over that hurdle and get eyeballs and feedback?

It took a long time. I think I could have launched about a year sooner, but wanted everything to be perfect, which seems a bit ridiculous now. I think it was the realisation that all the work would sort of be for nothing unless I launched it - that made me actually do it.

The most useful initial feedback was from a reddit group (r/testflight), but friends and family gave very helpful feedback too. I just tried to show anyone I could, it was also very helpful to watch how people use it without guiding them. The most useful feedback will feel brutal initially.

After launch, I did a ShowHN on here, which after posting a few times eventually picked up. Press was tricky initially, but after a lot of persistence, there were a few articles too. I had no idea how much work promoting something would be.

Note that even after you ship nobody will notice your app, unless you start doing some marketing. So even if you ship, nothing really big will happen initially (this can be quite a disappointment).

I have released an early version of my app, but nobody knows. It is out there, you only need the URL to use it, but I have not posted the URL anywhere. Still waiting for that "one last feature to be implemented".

Don't leave us hanging, what's the url!?

Give me another month or two. I will post a ShowNH here.

No, not like that. Break the vicious cycle, get early user feedback.

Why another month or two? To add that one more feature that you think it needs, more polish? If it's stable and solves the core problem you set out to solve then ship today. Try to have a life is short mentality :)

I also used to work on a lot of side projects, but never shipped any of them. Eventually I decided that shipping was important to me, so I started changing my mindset a bit.

What helped me the most was recognizing that 1) it didn't have to be perfect, 2) most likely no one is going to see what you ship anyway, and 3) you have several attempts to re-ship what you've built.

The biggest thing was just getting over perfectionism. Nowadays, if something is good enough and it works, I'm fine with it. I don't stress if I have a few bugs here and there.

I still encounter feature-creep here and there, but generally if I remind myself to prioritize getting something out the door, I tend to go with "good enough". And again, if I mess something up, I can ship an update, so it's not a huge deal.

I recently put out in public the prototype of the game that I have been slaving on for the last 1.5 years - despite all the bug checking I did it, it's still filled with bugs and the gameplay is basic. But then I realized - at this stage very few people care and the ones that do will forgive your stumbling starts. As long as you manage expectations you can just continuously iterate on it and patch.

Now that I know I can just fix a few bugs, add a some small content here and there and push it on a weekend - there is actually a mental peace.

The book Lynchpin talks about this and calls it "the resistance", the feeling of avoidance you get when nearing shipping something or even to sitting down and starting an ambitious project. I've found it useful to have a name for it so I can recognize when I'm falling prey to "the resistance" and get myself to stop procrastinating or to "just ship it".

I suspect Linchpin / Godin has "borrowed" the idea of Resistance from Steven Pressfield's excellent book The War Of Art from 2002. That book is aimed at writers, but applies to anyone creative.

I'm guilty of this. I've had 3 (so far) MVPs made, solo dev, made the infra, the website, the app (for one of those 3), and I'm sitting on my ass afraid to ship.

What's stopping you?

No idea. Maybe it's fear, maybe it's something else. Any advice?

Lick the stamp and send it.

The regret of never trying will (eventually) bring you greater sadness than a failed launch. The path of least pain is to launch. Do it.

I think you need to be able to answer that question. Spend some time going into depth understanding what really is holding you back. Only then you’d be able to solve it.

You're commenting on a post called "The Fear of Shipping", and you said above you're "afraid to ship". Now you claim you have no idea and could be anything, really.

There is nothing stopping you except your own bullshit. Do the minimum necessary to "ship" and if that's daunting, then you're trying too hard to be too big too fast and you'll never be able to get anywhere at all. Remember that if you actually care about a project, shipping isn't the end of it, but the beginning. You won't be happy with the results of shipping, because no one will notice and even fewer people will care. But if you ship it now, if the perfect user comes along, they'll find your URL somehow (maybe you give it to them) and fall in love with your idea without any further involvement from you. And then you can iterate.

If you don't ship now, then just accept your fate, and stop talking about these projects as though you're going to ship them.

Maybe fear of social judgement? What would you think of communicating first in a region with a group far away from your social circle ? EG if you’re asian and live in SV, silently deploy and ask people opinion in a related-field forum in the Netherlands or South Africa.

Bonus point: you expend your social circle.

Probably the worry over the next part, which you're probably subconsciously aware of. After shipping the product, comes the worst bit:

.....users......demands...monetary remuneration...support...maintenance...marketing...rejection...

Then it's not a fun educational experience anymore.

Could just be procrastination on doing the unfamiliar. You know and possibly enjoy the development part. But it's not the case that you're done with these projects. You're opening yourself up to a LOT more work, which you may not enjoy.

And can you really ship 3 different MVPs? Are these essentially 3 different businesses? Or if they aren't businesses, do you have time to maintain all of them?

I think the the feeling is more complex than fear. Do people overeat because they are hungry? I'm not a therapist, but I'm guessing that eating is their way of comforting themselves. And so, they associate a stressful situation with being hungry. Maybe you're feeling the tangled web of emotions which go with doing the unfamiliar with fear.

IMHO there's nothing wrong with duds. There is more than one way to succeed. I do agree, however, that shipping is better than not

This reads like something I could've wrote. Built a bunch of apps, launched none. Always feels like there are more features left to complete, and eventually I get bored and/or jump to some other idea that looks more promising.

I think part of it is also fear of rejection. Easier to tell nobody then to put yourself out there.

And as much as I like to think I don't care about money, I think the reality is that it's hard to keep plugging away on some side project if there's no financial incentive (I speak as someone who's not financially independent, maybe not having to worry about money would change things).

Might as well list my most recent unlaunched side projects

- MindGarden.app (currently sitting at yume.fyi, and I need to redo the landing page). Basically started off as an attempt to make a Notion clone that I plan to open source, where users can publish folders of documents (eg. into a blog). But there's always more work to do (eg. bare minimum would be end-to-end encryption, proper image support, endless list of random bugs / unfinished work, and then there's extra stuff like multiplayer support, desktop app, etc.). Hard to stay motivated to keep at it when I don't see any potential for it to make money since it's basically an inferior Notion.

- zsync.xyz - Reddit / HN where my primary goal is that comment quality be high, and posts can be separated by tags. Put some minor UX modifications to try to incentivize that, and was going to put in some token incentives before the bear market and not finding a good strategy around that that can't just be gamed. But in any case I realized there's a massive chicken and egg problem with this kind of site so got bored and stopped working on it without even posting it anywhere.

- nomadz.app - A crowdsourced map of cafes that are good for working, where people can rate them by wifi speed, power outlets, etc. Didn't post it anywhere because it's kind of crap, and I realized it's probably not worthwhile to continue working on it. I still think something like this could be very valuable (I've been nomadic the last 5 years working out of coffee shops so finding good work cafes is a big deal for me), but of all the possible things I could be working on I can't rank this towards the top.

I'll try to put in the last mile to get mindgarden.app to a launchable state.

Of course now my side project attention is focused on a new app I'm building. I think this new app has more obvious utility, though would be difficult to monetize. But will do my best to actually finish and launch it!

Friendly "don't make my mistake" suggestion - skip the nomadz.app. I tried building exactly that over a decade ago. I have seen many others build it over the years. There's even someone else on HN who made something very similar (but with grander vision), and independently came up with exactly the same name I did! Cool people though. I believe they got VC funding for it, launched on web & iOS, but it still didn't survive beyond 2 years.

It's an itch many of us have, but there might just be better ways to solve it. Instead of searching for places with the best WiFi & Power, just bring your own mobile hotspot & external phone battery, and even a portable laptop battery if you really need power (eg Hyper made a 100W airplane-friendly battery that can drive a laptop & recharge it twice over & even supported Apple's proprietary MagSafe connections). You still need to find the cafes & when they're open, but that's largely solved by Google Maps or asking on Nomad List. (Also worth asking, why isn't this a feature built-in to Nomad List?!)

I don't want to dissuade you from launching, it's already hard enough to stay positive about projects (and this is a thread about Fear Of Shipping after all!) Maybe you can succeed where others haven't! But maybe talking about a project openly is useful, because then others can find the holes in the plan before you expend too much effort, and you can be more quantitative about fixing those holes or discovering that it's an unprofitable idea.

(2012)

I am the king of this. It has been 12 years and we had more than 6 million users — and we still have yet to ship Groups for Android for example.

Oh wait I have you one better — it has been 12 years and https://github.com/Qbix/Platform is only now almost ready to be released, as v2.0

Sure we “ship” it all the time, on github. We even released v1.0 but we didn’t announce it because we aren’t great at PR.

People who discover https://qbix.com are shocked that there is a decentralized open source alternative platform to Facebook and Twitter that is far more full-featured than Mastodon, Bluesky or even Matrix and they never heard of it.

Well… the problem is that I picked a very complex space, one where no one got this far except for billion-dollar companies. People kept expecting everything to be real-time and rock-solid, and even when we finally got that done after many years, they still complain it “doesn’t look as good as Twitter”.

Every time I shipped half-baked stuff, it didn’t actually take off. Now, I believe it WOULD have taken off if it had a low demand surface area (eg Bitcoin just stores value and transfers it, period). But I tend to build stuff that is similar to what people use EVERY DAY, and that kind of stuff accrued lots of features.

Oh yeah my other project https://intercoin.org blockchain platform took 5 years to create. During that time we went from a crypto winter to a super bull market in crypto to another winter with super bear skepticism on HN.

On HN we knee-jerk get lumped in with stuff that isn’t even blockchain, like FTX or Binance, or ridiculous shitcoins that have no utility at all.

Imagine if I shipped https://intercoin.app and announced it on HN lol. At best it would be crickets, at worst I would be berated for somejow being a scammer by… working 5 years and putting all my money into making these blockchain solutions for the world. Most people wouldn’t even bother looking past the title.

Our stuff is FREE AND OPEN SOURCE and you use it if you want, or don’t. Before complaining that it even exists to help people for free, or calling it a scam, at least click the link to https://github.com/Intercoin

A word about regulations, because you shouldn’t “just ship” in violation of laws (unless you’re Uber or AirBNB lol). Even though we raised money in an ICO pursuant to Reg D and Reg S exemotions, filed Form D with the SEC, got people who worked at the SEC as active advisors, complied with laws in multiple other jurisdictions, innovated in many areas of securities law, and carefully developed tokens to fit the No-Action letters grantsd to projects like PocketFullOfQuarters, people on HN just assume that we are like most of the others who didn’t treat their tokens as securities. Which is understandable. (I am not admitting the token ARE securities, this is a matter of opinion that a judge would determine, merely that we didn’t want to take the chance that the original transactions weren’t securities transactions.)

Btw besides securities there is also this FATCA, FINCEN and other stuff that many startups here should read even if they aren’t making web3 or crypto projects, but ARE dealing with money and payouts to people on their platform: https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/2019-05/FinCEN%20...

Not to mention that if you make your software available in Europe, you have to comply with GDPR and soon might be forced to comply with the draconian new CYBER RESILIENCE ACT. If it passes then we will have to honestly change our OPEN SOURCE license to no longer allow Europeans to legally access our software:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/18/in-letter-to-european-comm...

So yeah. Shipping at scale is complicated !!

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