This is why you ship | Hacker News Reader

This is why you ship

tommy.authpad.com

25 pointstomasien9 comments

I want to hear people who flopped say "just ship it".

Because how many second chances do you get?

The people who get lucky always say "do what I did" - it's a constant theme in business, they take credit for their actions when it was more of right time, right place, that cannot be easily duplicated.

I believe it's the same, you'll waste no more time at a failing project while being able to put your time into a possibly successful next project.

I seriously hate that this sort of bullshit blogpost gets upvotes on HN. Is there content here? No.

It's a veiled advertisement for another shitty iOS word game.

And I can't even downvote.

Sorry it got upvotes. I wanted to keep it short, but I thought it was interesting that we thought we should release the social version, didn't, were proven right by feedback BUT got valuable users because of some luck that shipping brought us. I thought that was interesting and I thought I'd share it. I intentionally kept the name and all details about the game out of the post so it wouldn't feel like an ad. I linked to it for those who were curious but that's it.

This is completely the wrong message, but there's something useful hiding here. "Just ship it" is idiotic, and can cost you tremendously in many ways.

Rather, the appropriate message is: "Make a decision, and move on."

The misstep was waiting a month before shipping when it was ready to ship. Waiting a month for a decision is stupid. If the decision was "Don't ship it," that would have been fine too. As long as a decision being made, you have somewhere to go and something to do. Decision paralysis, though, can kill a company.

The same kind of arguments can also go on, and are just as fruitless to persist in, within the mind of a single developer...

Are they really that fruitless, as a rule? As ck2 pointed out, the other side of this coin is "we skimped on design in favor of moving fast and shipping, and now we have an unfocused product with a janky architecture that will be near impossible to recover from because we've already launched."

I'm the kind of person who exhibits that endless internal deliberation, so I fully understand the need to keep that in check. But, as is often the case, I think the key is finding balance and adjusting based on awareness of your own propensities.

As mentioned in a few other comments here, posts like these seem to be more fluff then real advice. I'd rather hear more about the struggles of the teams disagreement, and how you came to a good plan from those discussions. You can tell me all day to jump off a bridge because the one time you jumped, it worked out and you landed on nice fluffy pillows. However, that doesn't really change my mind about jumping off a bridge. It seems much more constructive to talk about the inner workings of "why" I should do something, rather then just "Hey! Go. F^$#ING. DO. THIS."

Secondly, is "Always ship. Always. Fucking. Ship. God damnit, SHIP YOUR CODE ALREADY!" (end of the article) really necessary?

Really crappy feeling realizing that people got offended enough by how mediocre your blog was to flag and get it banned. My apologies HNers, I'll try to do better next time.

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