I have been working on a product with my cofounder for around 18 months; spent around six months of this doing consulting to keep the lights on. Released a few

I have been working on a product with my cofounder for around 18 months; spent around six months of this doing consulting to keep the lights on. Released a few early videos, gauged interest, but had to keep fending off users who wanted the promised software immediately. Those emails kept us going - even though we didn't validate by asking for money, the fact that people pestered us even after we told it won't be ready for a long while, gives us hope that when we release there will be at least a few people who would find it useful enough to pay money. I've been asked by a lot of people why we haven't released yet. We're dogfooding it; it is useful to us today, but it is not where I want it to truly be. Since I'm my own customer (this is a technical product, scratching my own itch), I will know when it is ready. It will be ready when I can build a functional front-end application from a design in two days, that would otherwise take me a month. What is taking us so long? We had to learn the internal API of an ever-changing software, learn a new language, build a Rails server, a Node server, a chrome extension, a Sketch plugin, an entire compiler-like thing, we had to figure out new ways of solving the design -> code problem, we had to duct-tape the hell out of so many things, and in the meantime we had to content with other aspects of life that are not technical. It is quite annoying to see the way people talk about the Lean MVP approach being the only way to build software. Some stuff takes time - not everything is a CRUD application that you can throw out into the void, put up some marketing pages, and have a hockey stick in three months. But the downside to my attitude is that most people who fail typically use the same argument - that we're exceptional and the lean MVP approach doesn't work for us. I actually think the produce I'm building is an exceptional case, but hey, isn't hindsight the only true foresight?