Ready, Fire, Aim.
Early shipping is a gift. Get some version of what you are working on out the door and into the public view. Unless you paint on canvas or carve from stone - both of which are one-way trips - this can only lead to good things.
Kat Manalac, a Partner at Y-Combinator, has a video on launching as part of the Startup School curriculum. The essential lesson is that there is no one "launch." You will do it many times. A "launch" is just an initiative to communicate more into a market. Each launch increases your reach and enhances your market knowledge.
So when one says, "I'm getting ready to launch," what do they mean? In my experience, this answer is trying to make things "just so" before presenting them to others. The fear is getting knocked for something you can anticipate. So we listen to our inner critic and try to run out the list of items that our inner critic demands.
But our inner critic is rarely right. It usually tells us to do what is important to us personally but not what matters to the market. And by not shipping, we don't have the market telling us what matters to drown out that critic.
This data is enormously valuable. It is also painful. Most often, this reaction is indifference, which is the most painful after putting in all that work! Indifference requires us to reach out to them to find out why they don't care. More importantly, what does matter to them? This hard work is where the evolution kicks into gear. Shipping delivers market signal - even when that signal is in awkward silence.
Even colleague feedback is more valuable after shipping. Consider the pre-shipping demo. You get feedback on what you have shown so far, and as they make suggestions or ask questions, you say - on the fly - that their idea is in the part of the demo you have not yet shown or is just around the corner. The line of conversation stops - that's terrible! You should want more of that data.
When you have an app working, you have to think about that feedback. It becomes actionable because you have a plan to evolve the product. It has a cost because you understand what the marginal work would be. Then you can decide how to integrate it into your planning. You get the full benefit of your colleagues' time and wisdom.
I recently got some great feedback about marketing materials I had assembled and shipped to an app store. The advice was on-point, actionable, and very wise. The trick was: I had already sent the content. It will take some days for the content to get "fixed," as it will have to go through a second review process. That's fine. I have something OK for now, and it gets better based on the clear feedback from my friends.
I take the same approach to these essays. I am shipping every day. I realize that not every article is gold, and I certainly look back and think, "I wish I wrote that better." But by shipping and moving on, I get feedback on which topics matter, and I circle back for either edits or creating newer, better versions.
Shipping more frequently has advantages in quality control as well. Increased frequency means what you ship is smaller and therefore simpler. Quicker time-to-ship discourages elaborate engineering, such as significant feature flagging. This optionality protects the code more than it protects the customer - or you. Adding feature flags as part of later edits is always an option.
Not everything can be shipped and edited. There exist projects that require more investment and complexity. Hardtech is a thing. But the vast majority of the founders I talk to do not fall into this category. Strangely, the could that do are also adept at finding alternative means of garnering market intelligence through experiments that run in parallel with their deep development process.
Those where lives or health are at stake similarly require more "aim" before "fire." I take those seriously. But most innovation is not in these critical domains. And even when it could be, a first step is to take the idea and put it in a non-critical environment to encourage earlier shipping and iteration.
We work in a digital domain over ephemeral bits. Our options to change our art are expansive and cheap. But none of them are available to us until we begin the feedback loop. The best feedback is from the market - let's get it while the day is young.
Nothing is ever done.
Ship it.
Photo by Bench Accounting on Unsplash