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Comment by charlieirish | Hacker News Reader

My experience is that you need to be able to ship iterations very quickly. You need to have a big blue button that says 'ship' on it. If you can release often, then the last 10% actually looks like 10 little 1% jobs.

Completing a 1% job 10 times is much easier than completing 1 10% job.

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Totally agree - ship what you have now, and then add the polish. Seriously if people care what your content is about they will live with lack of polish.

There is however an Internet sixth sense - that says "dodgy". A two page site with a email collection form mailchimp is waaaay more forgiveable than something that reeks of pump and dump

Absolutely. I believe these two groups of people are mutually exclusive: 1) Producers of 'Pump and Dump' sites and 2) People who struggle with the last x%.

Group 1 always produce low quality junk that triggers our 'dodgy' alarms. Group 2 always worry about producing something that is polished and finished.

The secret is to be in Group 2 but to have someone next to you shouting "Ship It!" as regularly as possible.

Some 37 signals outlet had a nice discussion on this. The key in their view was to limit the number of features rather than the quality of said features. Something about thinking of the features you want on a 2D map, and the thickness being the quality, building up your volume of work. To reduce volume you can break off pieces, but you should strive for even (and sufficient) thickness.

Too thin - pump & dump. To big volume - group 2. Small, but thick - good shit.

I guess this depends on the market you are entering though surely?

If you are entering an already pretty saturated market then you are probably going to struggle for customer attention without looking very slick.

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