There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it".
Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear:
Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible. So unless you own what you're coding and you really need it out of the door for your own benefit, if more time makes your work more professional, then take more time. Anyone telling you otherwise is a 100% hack. You are not an automaton that takes in JIRA tickets and spits out hacky code as soon as possible. Or at least you shouldn't be. Not to mention that not taking time (doing things properly) is incredibly taxing on your psyche and you WILL burn out. There are only so much garbage tasks you can take.
It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software. What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad. This is the thing that will ultimately make you feel good about the work you're doing. Hitting that arbitrary deadline for a 1425474th time may feel like a relief but it's short term and a form of negative motivation - and in the workplace, those NEVER work over a long period of time. So RESIST that pressure from the top and do your work properly. If they fire you, then who cares, the only way up these days is job hopping anyways.
> so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem
I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% was "having the idea". I thanked him and told him that he has a head-start of 6 months, if his app hasn't hit the market by then, I'd write the thing myself.
I was once involved in an indie game project. We had a middling idea for a crappy game but we were all hankering for software development experience in that field.
Of the 3 of us who set about coding it, 2 of us just sat down and started blocking the thing out. The third, pushed faulty code to the SVN, created a design document crediting the entire idea to himself, and then called a meeting telling us he is the game designer and he would sue us if we made the game elsewhere. The 2 of us actually contributing just looked at each other and dropped the whole thing. He basically played his cards face up and we got to see he was a pissant.
Later I did see someone with the same general idea on steam. Good for them honestly. If they came up with the idea separately, great. If they stole it from the loser, also great. If they managed to persevere under him they deserve some coin.
I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".
Not sure if it’s smart to do that if you aren’t entirely sure about what mental state a person could be in.
Edit: okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted for this but if you think you can just tell someone you’re going to steal their awesome idea in 6 months you better hope their not the type of “crazy” entrepreneur who will cause problems for you or in extreme cases even end up shooting you in the back of the head.
I wish someone would solve my problem for me. I'm working on the problem because there are no solutions that I can just go and buy. Someone else putting their blood, sweat, and tears into solving my problem, they're the ones who have to deal with being on-call for it, they're the ones who have to maintain it, would be a joy.
Why is it so important for you to be the one to solve this problem? Why is it so important for your solution to the problem to be a business? Running a business is about creating value for yourself and for your customer - if you're obsessed about the problem, be thankful that someone else is putting so much effort into solving it; if you're obsessed about the customer, then you would've shipped something to the customer a long time ago to get feedback.
I went through an unshipped app dev cycle that was fairly similar in many ways. Started on React, then RN, then Flutter, and eventually migrated away from graphql into sqlite.
My app had some similar aspirations -- to bridge the gap between habit motivation, goal adherence measurement, task scheduling & rescheduling. I worked on it for a few years, and my identity was very much wrapped up in eventually bootstrapping a company.
For me, the decision to let go of the project came in multiple phases, but one big closer was that I simply didn't want to be an app dev in the long run. While difficult to let go of, I currently feel good about the decision. Also, as evidenced by the resurrection part of the story, "nothing is ever fully lost" anyhow, though I doubt I'll ever return to this particular project.
One key idea I had for expanding beyond the "high cognitive load" nature of most productivity apps was to implement a "life module" marketplace of sorts that would let, say, a fitness influencer sell a workout routine + meal plan + journal template one could "install" into their life.
LLMs will also make detecting fall-off and attempting to attribute causes, or respond to "non-actions" much more feasible, which I think is important for anyone not type-A enough to use a productivity app consistently every day on their own.
I just tried it and the detected timezone for me is called:
"Africa/Ceuta (Romance Standard Time) (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris"
While the assigned delta with GMT is correct, this is confusing as hell because neither Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid or Paris are in Africa. You may want to take a look at the TZ info you are using.
Hi! Looks great, maybe I'll give it a try... Is it named after this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benji ? I was a huge fan of him (them?) when I was about 6-8 years old!
...and sorry about expressing my frustration (and suspicion) about you not mentioning the name of your "competitor"! I guess now that you have released your own app, the chances of you mentioning it are even smaller (if it's still around at all)?
I found that becoming an actual user of your own system changes the perspective entirely. I had this thing that I was making for myself, and it was not ready, not usable at all, or so I thought.
After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the creator of something, you sometimes forget that a lot of sloppyness will not be a dealbreaker, and the user will effortlessly work around many of the shortcomings. Obtaining perfection is more about ego at that point.
So trying to actually use it, ignoring that you are the one who made it, and forbidding yourself to make any modifications for a while, can change everything!
I think this is why ship it and iterate fast is often the best path. There will be deal breaking bugs in any software project. If your accounting package doesn’t account correctly, you probably shouldn’t just ship it. But if one of the reports displays twice for some reason, users can probably deal with it until the next iteration as long as that next iteration isn’t months to years away. But the reality is you wont even find what most of the “bugs” your users will encounter until it’s out in the wild with real users. And unless you ship it, you’ll not get to work on the bugs your users are actually impacted by.
Interesting point. An app I just used had an embedded ios web browser that didn't work properly.
I opened the web page directly and used it like that. The username/password were iCloud-synced, of course. Took me all of 5 seconds to resume the user flow in Safari (which only took another 30 seconds to finish.)
I think it's something that I already knew in my heart, but I think by putting it like this you killed some shipping anxiety and perfectionism tendency in me. Thanks :)
Not the best example of "just ship it". The thing about these productivity apps (TODO, habit tracking, spending tracking, journaling, workout planning etc.) is that lots of people have these ideas independently. You can't imagine how clever I felt when I thought of the idea of an app that helps you keep track of your expenses. Then I checked the Play Store. KRAZAM even made fun of it the "The Hustle" video 5 years ago.
Yeah, this is probably the most overdone app category in the history of overdone app categories.
That's not to say that a new twist on it can't be successful (most successful things aren't entirely original), but if you're worrying about someone releasing their version earlier and beating you, just take a look around.
I think you missed the point of the article, which is to ship it despite competitors; in fact, competitors validate your idea, it is a good sign, not a bad one.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, when I started working on Kviklet we were a team of 3 and one of us was a lot more perfectionist than the others. It took a lot of convincing to even put our (tbf shitty) first website version up. Much more to release our repo.
We lost that "co-founder" early on, but man I'm glad we released early and tried to sell.
It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were working on a product without knowing if anyone would ever want to pay for it, keeping our hopes up in the dark.
By now we went with the backup plan and open sourced and have a few cool users. Could maybe even say it's a small community: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
It's not the startup success story that I hoped for a year ago. But it's a lot better than still hoping for it and not being a bit more grounded.
Also open-source doesn't mean I can never sell support or a premium version and still make a few bucks right? For now it's just a fun side project though.
> Pull Request-like Review/Approval flow for database queries
Terrible description IMO. a query should not need approval. Should use mutation or edit or update or modification. Even if query is technically correct it just sounds wrong and confusing.
If I was writing something for myself, I'd not be sad that someone had beat me to it: it just proves that the idea was a good one!
Then again, none of the many personal projects I've got in my head and on paper (few of them even actually started) are ones that I would release to sell. They are things that I want or that friends/family/other might find useful. Heck, if I had something Alpha quality maybe I'd release that in the hopes someone would see it and think “this idea is useful, but the implementation is shite, I'll write a better one”.
> If I was writing something for myself, I'd not be sad that someone had beat me to it
The reality is that you’ve already been beaten to the punch by something in almost every situation. If you’re automating something for the first time in history then the preexisting manual method is your initial competitor. In the case of the app in the article they’re competing against that other app but also every other possible patchwork of partial solutions that their target customers are already using.
Additionally, if you are the first mover then you’ll quickly have competitors rise up and eat away at your advantage without your effort to stay ahead competitively.
So, since you’re always scooped then don’t worry about being scooped and since competition now or later is a certainty then instead focus on your competitive advantage. The author came to this realization in the end, bravo and good luck!
On the other hand, there is no second try, to make a first impression. And the first impression lasts a while. So at least get some feedback before "just shipping". Otherwise reactions might be "doesn't work" - because what was obviously a start button for you making it, was not so obvious for someone just stumbling over it.
When I read this I was like "Oh, that sounds like my family calendar / collaborative productivty app I am working on for months ". And in the last sentence he mentions
> I wanted an app that combines Todos, Habits, Planner, Goals, Pomodoros, Meal tracking, Fasting, Hydration, Packing, Trips, and many many more features.
What was your purpose in developing this app? It sounds like you were trying to solve a problem you had for which there were no other good solutions. If this was the primary purpose, then it's only meant for you and not for anyone else, so why "ship it"? For personal use, shipping it simply means using it.
If you want to produce a product to sell, then yes, for the most part you want to ship as soon as you have a minimum viable product - something that at least accomplishes something valuable, even if it could be better.
But if you're working on something for fun and you consider open sourcing it, don't rush into shipping it. As soon as you release it to the public, people will start hounding you to fix bugs and add features. If you try to please them, you'll quickly find yourself working a part time job for no pay - your hobby will turn into a burden.
Releasing anything to the public - whether for profit or not - opens you up to a lot of pressure and judgement. You are making a commitment, whether you intend to or not.
Before shipping it, think carefully about whether you want to commit to supporting it. If not, then just keep it to yourself.
Giving up on a project - even one that works - isn't a bad thing. People change. Just because you wanted to work on it 6 months ago doesn't mean you want to do it now. Don't feel obligated to keep doing something you no longer enjoy. Often the important thing is that you went through the process - you learned a lot and you overcame a challenge. You can leave it at that and still be a success.
Author is a bit high on his own supply - he thinks someone copied his great ideas where I see it as generic silly widgets. So of course he thinks it is great so much that people will love it … but just reading the thread I see the other app he was paying for stopped implementing features, because no todo app is „super great idea”.
Well good job implementing, good effort, but that’s just „yet another todo app”.
I have a side project that's just an internal tool for my music visualizer/ lyric video generator.
It has no functional sign up for new users and is very difficult to use. It's "shipped" as in I use it for my projects.
Another is a simple web app a friend requested. He uses it occasionally. I'm sure y'all on HN could probably find half a dozen issues with it. But it's what my friend wanted and I learned a lot.
The moral of the story is use Flutter from the start, don't worry about shipping apps( do you really want to struggle with the various app stores for what's just a web app anyway), and ship early and often.
I feel this deep in my bones. I worked on <some project> a long while back because I wanted to scratch an itch, and I thought that some of the problems I was seeing, hey, maybe someone else was having them too. So I start kinda-sorta-half-heartedly exploring the idea, writing some pilot code, then I discovered hacker news. And oh boy did people have things to say about the general problem, it's impossible to solve, no one should waste their time, we can just <do the drop box thing and wire up ninety five things and make it shamble along>, definitely no need to waste time trying to implement something new from scratch.
Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."
Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.
Fuck.
Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.
Actually it is not that bad. New ideas often require a significant push so people not only get comfortable with it but also start to demand it. Having someone else bigger to do this hard work opens an actual market for it that you can now enter.
You don't need to be first or second, esp. if you're a small player. You can still win some market share over time (and it doesn't need to be small compared to what you would achieve if you would be first as the market is now bigger). Make it helpful to people who find the established solutions lacking on features or workflows that could be better.
In other words, when is it the right time to ship? With a good product, at any time. Does it matter that there are already multiple established players? Not really, you can always come up with a better version.
I'm sorry that happened to you. The comments here are generally high quality and I've learned quite a lot from them, but there are things I've learned from experience that go against conventional wisdom here.
Although not as drastic a case as yours, I think it's often worth being critical of what one reads here and keeping one's ideals until actual experience makes one incline one way or the other.
I've got three separate applications all "close to finished" and I've been working on them for years (along with many other things).
Just as I'm getting real close to being finished enough to release - something changes - life changes - or some other thing changes - or I don't believe in the product any more - then I do believe in the product again - then blah blah blah. Always "legitimate" reasons - outcome always the same - haven't shipped anything in years except a bunch of open source projects.
It sucks to realize that someone else beat you to a proper release. Happened in my last job, we went though the stages of grief just as the author here.
In the end you learned a lot about new technology, about your pace of development, about you thinking, about aspects you like and don't like. The lessons learned "ship it" prepares for next time.
It's unfair he didn't include the name of the app in the article (or it's unfair that I can't see properly, if he did). I want to see what this problem was he was trying to solve!
The author posted a comment here about that, and that this article is about https://benji.so/ . Sounds like HN comments were persuasive in releasing the app that triggered the article.
[+] [-] Culonavirus|1 year ago|reply
Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear:
Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible. So unless you own what you're coding and you really need it out of the door for your own benefit, if more time makes your work more professional, then take more time. Anyone telling you otherwise is a 100% hack. You are not an automaton that takes in JIRA tickets and spits out hacky code as soon as possible. Or at least you shouldn't be. Not to mention that not taking time (doing things properly) is incredibly taxing on your psyche and you WILL burn out. There are only so much garbage tasks you can take.
It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software. What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad. This is the thing that will ultimately make you feel good about the work you're doing. Hitting that arbitrary deadline for a 1425474th time may feel like a relief but it's short term and a form of negative motivation - and in the workplace, those NEVER work over a long period of time. So RESIST that pressure from the top and do your work properly. If they fire you, then who cares, the only way up these days is job hopping anyways.
[+] [-] ggeorgovassilis|1 year ago|reply
I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% was "having the idea". I thanked him and told him that he has a head-start of 6 months, if his app hasn't hit the market by then, I'd write the thing myself.
[+] [-] protocolture|1 year ago|reply
Of the 3 of us who set about coding it, 2 of us just sat down and started blocking the thing out. The third, pushed faulty code to the SVN, created a design document crediting the entire idea to himself, and then called a meeting telling us he is the game designer and he would sue us if we made the game elsewhere. The 2 of us actually contributing just looked at each other and dropped the whole thing. He basically played his cards face up and we got to see he was a pissant.
Later I did see someone with the same general idea on steam. Good for them honestly. If they came up with the idea separately, great. If they stole it from the loser, also great. If they managed to persevere under him they deserve some coin.
[+] [-] silisili|1 year ago|reply
If the idea was truly good so much so you believed in it, it was a heck of an offer tbh.
[+] [-] saulpw|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] deadbabe|1 year ago|reply
Edit: okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted for this but if you think you can just tell someone you’re going to steal their awesome idea in 6 months you better hope their not the type of “crazy” entrepreneur who will cause problems for you or in extreme cases even end up shooting you in the back of the head.
[+] [-] solatic|1 year ago|reply
Why is it so important for you to be the one to solve this problem? Why is it so important for your solution to the problem to be a business? Running a business is about creating value for yourself and for your customer - if you're obsessed about the problem, be thankful that someone else is putting so much effort into solving it; if you're obsessed about the customer, then you would've shipped something to the customer a long time ago to get feedback.
[+] [-] thekitze|1 year ago|reply
People are always like "why don't you just ship your app?" ... so I did!
I'm happy I went through with and it's way WAY better than any competitor in this category
Check it out at https://benji.so (landing page is still w.i.p)
[+] [-] philipwhiuk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] micimize|1 year ago|reply
My app had some similar aspirations -- to bridge the gap between habit motivation, goal adherence measurement, task scheduling & rescheduling. I worked on it for a few years, and my identity was very much wrapped up in eventually bootstrapping a company.
For me, the decision to let go of the project came in multiple phases, but one big closer was that I simply didn't want to be an app dev in the long run. While difficult to let go of, I currently feel good about the decision. Also, as evidenced by the resurrection part of the story, "nothing is ever fully lost" anyhow, though I doubt I'll ever return to this particular project.
One key idea I had for expanding beyond the "high cognitive load" nature of most productivity apps was to implement a "life module" marketplace of sorts that would let, say, a fitness influencer sell a workout routine + meal plan + journal template one could "install" into their life.
LLMs will also make detecting fall-off and attempting to attribute causes, or respond to "non-actions" much more feasible, which I think is important for anyone not type-A enough to use a productivity app consistently every day on their own.
[+] [-] pantulis|1 year ago|reply
"Africa/Ceuta (Romance Standard Time) (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris"
While the assigned delta with GMT is correct, this is confusing as hell because neither Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid or Paris are in Africa. You may want to take a look at the TZ info you are using.
EDIT: See comment below, this is not an issue.
[+] [-] idk1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rob74|1 year ago|reply
...and sorry about expressing my frustration (and suspicion) about you not mentioning the name of your "competitor"! I guess now that you have released your own app, the chances of you mentioning it are even smaller (if it's still around at all)?
[+] [-] edg5000|1 year ago|reply
After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the creator of something, you sometimes forget that a lot of sloppyness will not be a dealbreaker, and the user will effortlessly work around many of the shortcomings. Obtaining perfection is more about ego at that point.
So trying to actually use it, ignoring that you are the one who made it, and forbidding yourself to make any modifications for a while, can change everything!
[+] [-] tstrimple|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] knallfrosch|1 year ago|reply
I opened the web page directly and used it like that. The username/password were iCloud-synced, of course. Took me all of 5 seconds to resume the user flow in Safari (which only took another 30 seconds to finish.)
[+] [-] blackbrokkoli|1 year ago|reply
I think it's something that I already knew in my heart, but I think by putting it like this you killed some shipping anxiety and perfectionism tendency in me. Thanks :)
[+] [-] thekitze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] torlok|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] realharo|1 year ago|reply
That's not to say that a new twist on it can't be successful (most successful things aren't entirely original), but if you're worrying about someone releasing their version earlier and beating you, just take a look around.
[+] [-] satvikpendem|1 year ago|reply
I think you missed the point of the article, which is to ship it despite competitors; in fact, competitors validate your idea, it is a good sign, not a bad one.
[+] [-] raincole|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] pm90|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] thekitze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] purple-leafy|1 year ago|reply
So you made a proof of concept and rested on your laurels. Too bad, that’s life. They did the work and reaped the rewards.
Lesson learnt. You can’t claim ideas
[+] [-] jascha_eng|1 year ago|reply
It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were working on a product without knowing if anyone would ever want to pay for it, keeping our hopes up in the dark.
By now we went with the backup plan and open sourced and have a few cool users. Could maybe even say it's a small community: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
It's not the startup success story that I hoped for a year ago. But it's a lot better than still hoping for it and not being a bit more grounded. Also open-source doesn't mean I can never sell support or a premium version and still make a few bucks right? For now it's just a fun side project though.
[+] [-] 38|1 year ago|reply
Terrible description IMO. a query should not need approval. Should use mutation or edit or update or modification. Even if query is technically correct it just sounds wrong and confusing.
[+] [-] dspillett|1 year ago|reply
Then again, none of the many personal projects I've got in my head and on paper (few of them even actually started) are ones that I would release to sell. They are things that I want or that friends/family/other might find useful. Heck, if I had something Alpha quality maybe I'd release that in the hopes someone would see it and think “this idea is useful, but the implementation is shite, I'll write a better one”.
[+] [-] nyokodo|1 year ago|reply
The reality is that you’ve already been beaten to the punch by something in almost every situation. If you’re automating something for the first time in history then the preexisting manual method is your initial competitor. In the case of the app in the article they’re competing against that other app but also every other possible patchwork of partial solutions that their target customers are already using.
Additionally, if you are the first mover then you’ll quickly have competitors rise up and eat away at your advantage without your effort to stay ahead competitively.
So, since you’re always scooped then don’t worry about being scooped and since competition now or later is a certainty then instead focus on your competitive advantage. The author came to this realization in the end, bravo and good luck!
[+] [-] lukan|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] tass|1 year ago|reply
The point of an MVP is to elicit feedback, know you’re on the right track to build something useful, and iterate.
[+] [-] rawbert|1 year ago|reply
> I wanted an app that combines Todos, Habits, Planner, Goals, Pomodoros, Meal tracking, Fasting, Hydration, Packing, Trips, and many many more features.
Surprised Pikachu face.
[+] [-] adastra22|1 year ago|reply
Most apps and services you use were not first to market.
[+] [-] thekitze|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RevEng|1 year ago|reply
If you want to produce a product to sell, then yes, for the most part you want to ship as soon as you have a minimum viable product - something that at least accomplishes something valuable, even if it could be better.
But if you're working on something for fun and you consider open sourcing it, don't rush into shipping it. As soon as you release it to the public, people will start hounding you to fix bugs and add features. If you try to please them, you'll quickly find yourself working a part time job for no pay - your hobby will turn into a burden.
Releasing anything to the public - whether for profit or not - opens you up to a lot of pressure and judgement. You are making a commitment, whether you intend to or not.
Before shipping it, think carefully about whether you want to commit to supporting it. If not, then just keep it to yourself.
Giving up on a project - even one that works - isn't a bad thing. People change. Just because you wanted to work on it 6 months ago doesn't mean you want to do it now. Don't feel obligated to keep doing something you no longer enjoy. Often the important thing is that you went through the process - you learned a lot and you overcame a challenge. You can leave it at that and still be a success.
[+] [-] ozim|1 year ago|reply
Author is a bit high on his own supply - he thinks someone copied his great ideas where I see it as generic silly widgets. So of course he thinks it is great so much that people will love it … but just reading the thread I see the other app he was paying for stopped implementing features, because no todo app is „super great idea”.
Well good job implementing, good effort, but that’s just „yet another todo app”.
[+] [-] xlinux|1 year ago|reply
It's called advertising or spam they say
[+] [-] 999900000999|1 year ago|reply
I have a side project that's just an internal tool for my music visualizer/ lyric video generator.
It has no functional sign up for new users and is very difficult to use. It's "shipped" as in I use it for my projects.
Another is a simple web app a friend requested. He uses it occasionally. I'm sure y'all on HN could probably find half a dozen issues with it. But it's what my friend wanted and I learned a lot.
The moral of the story is use Flutter from the start, don't worry about shipping apps( do you really want to struggle with the various app stores for what's just a web app anyway), and ship early and often.
[+] [-] theideaofcoffee|1 year ago|reply
Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."
Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.
Fuck.
Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.
[+] [-] jezek2|1 year ago|reply
You don't need to be first or second, esp. if you're a small player. You can still win some market share over time (and it doesn't need to be small compared to what you would achieve if you would be first as the market is now bigger). Make it helpful to people who find the established solutions lacking on features or workflows that could be better.
In other words, when is it the right time to ship? With a good product, at any time. Does it matter that there are already multiple established players? Not really, you can always come up with a better version.
[+] [-] zogrodea|1 year ago|reply
Although not as drastic a case as yours, I think it's often worth being critical of what one reads here and keeping one's ideals until actual experience makes one incline one way or the other.
[+] [-] andrewstuart|1 year ago|reply
Just as I'm getting real close to being finished enough to release - something changes - life changes - or some other thing changes - or I don't believe in the product any more - then I do believe in the product again - then blah blah blah. Always "legitimate" reasons - outcome always the same - haven't shipped anything in years except a bunch of open source projects.
[+] [-] schobi|1 year ago|reply
In the end you learned a lot about new technology, about your pace of development, about you thinking, about aspects you like and don't like. The lessons learned "ship it" prepares for next time.
[+] [-] StopHammoTime|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zogrodea|1 year ago|reply
Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40872817