21 ms·

The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

571 points by cercatrova 4y ago

calltrak 4y ago
techplex 4y ago
I know it doesn't matter for the point the author is trying to make but, Such a tease, what does the app do?
- Chris2048 4y ago
  Given they got suspicious about if their idea was stolen, it'd be interesting if the app solves something unique, or some very common problem.
  - paxys 4y ago
    Yeah I'm fully expecting it to be something like a project management app. There are tons of ideas which you think are unique, but many, many others have them as well, because they run into all the same problems as you in their day to day life.
- mynegation 4y ago
  I remember he at some point had a landing page for a browser that would show you a web page in multiple resolutions, all at once, with hot reload. Not sure if this is the application, he might have had another one.
  - bambax 4y ago
    Yes, he made Sizzy, and it's apparently very successful. Here's the story (quite well told I think): https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent
pflenker 4y ago
A big fallacy that I always see - and that is implied by this post - is that the work ends after shipping, a.k.a. "build it and they will come". That doesn't happen any more. So after you "ship" it, you need to promote it, advertise it, create buzz around it and make people use it. And that is a totally different kind of beast than coding something. But on the flip side, if you develop a side project just for yourself, you most certainly learn something. Heck, the author explicitly mentioned learning React Native, which is absolutely great and definitely worth investing time into. Learning things is valuable in itself.
- aliswe 4y ago
  most importantly you also need to continue developing it
- Chris2048 4y ago
  Yes, Given they couldn't develop the app without planning the release, I wonder if they'd have time to properly support it if they shipped..
- OrwellianTimes 4y ago
  'So I deployed it on Vercel, bought a domain name and posted it on the brand twitter account we created a few days ago. Why am I not getting users?'
- bambax 4y ago
  > "build it and they will come" I also used to think that build it and they will come was a big fallacy, but it's not really. The fallacy is, "build it and the whole world will fight to get what you built". That sure won't happen by itself or by chance. But if you build something reasonably good, some people will come. That may not be enough for you to make a living out of it, but it will make it worthwhile. > Learning things is valuable in itself. From the same author: > Open source, writing blog posts, and playing with tweaking lint settings and editor themes all day are completely fine until your landlord knocks on your door or you're at the checkout at the grocery store. You're doing a crazy 2-hour commute every day telling yourself "well at least I'm learning a lot about SVG". Fuck that. https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent (I am actually, currently learning a lot about SVG and love it; but the quote is right that it's not paying the rent.)
darkteflon 4y ago
From the headline, honestly I thought this was going to involve a death.
- Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
  Yes, I would say the “just ship the Therac-25 with the Therac-20 firmware” to be a few degrees sadder.
- llampx 4y ago
  I actually thought it was going to involve a Boeing product manager. /potshot
martindbp 4y ago
Yep, I'm there, been going for a year, it's amazing how quickly time passes by. Getting ready to ship, for realsies this time. Maybe I'm imagining, but due to the unimaginable number of apps and SaaS out there today, it's not as easy to put out something you're embarrassed about. The only way to do that is to have something extremely small and polished, in which case it's almost certainly been done already multiple times. I'm sure there are some niches still to be filled, but it sure was easier back in, say, 2012.
- op00to 4y ago
  You can do it! HN believes in you.
- krallja 4y ago
  > it sure was easier back in, say, 2012 I was on HN in 2012. It was not any easier. People said the same thing back then. “Oh, if only I had gotten started in 2005, with DHTML, when things were easier.” “I wish I was paying attention when iPhone app store came out.” Just because you missed one boat doesn’t mean you’ll miss the next one. Keep an eye out for it. «History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.»
  - martindbp 4y ago
    I hope you're right!
    - krallja 4y ago
      “Now when I got to Hollywood, I was discouraged with animation. I didn’t think I’d ever do another animated thing. I said, I think I’m getting in it too late. Felix the Cat was going then, [and] other things, and I just said, it’s too late. I should have been in the business six years before.” — Walt Disney
batch12 4y ago
It still isn't too late to finish the app/site and put it out there. Instead, it seems that the author burned out. With that said, there's no shame in dropping the project to stay sane.
simmo9000 4y ago
"... fuck it, I'm gonna work on WEB DEVELOPMENT. That bad." I hear you!
op00to 4y ago
This article made me so sad - the author really doesn't need to be as hard on themselves as they are!
- rob74 4y ago
  I think he was exaggerating to make it a more interesting read. Or, at least, I hope so...
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
Kinda feel the app that managed to ship deserved a shoutout in this. Your idea is already out there, the value is 0.
frontman1988 4y ago
Being a solo dev on some app/website is not really worth it these days. There was a time when you could single-handedly create a million dollar app in some niche. But now the competition has increased so much that you need VC money or atleast a team if you want to create any impact whatsoever.
- slimebart 4y ago
  I don't believe this. A solo developer can create a more focused product, with less features, and still do well for themselves. Once you accept VC money you need to do well for the entire company, and the expectation is to be less niche to meet many users. Just talking very generally.
- jetbooster 4y ago
  Is this not debunked by Wordle's success? That was a single dev effort, and sold for multiple millions.
- llampx 4y ago
  If your only KPI is "Am I at unicorn valuation yet?" then yes, but I'm sure you can do well being a small fish in a big pond. There are still underserved markets out there. Find your niche and build your product around it.
- simmo9000 4y ago
  I think this is a valid comment questioning where one puts their goalpost for their realisation of a funded MVP coming from their idea. The market has shifted alot from what it was 5 years ago... 10 years, 15, 20, 30... Ideas are what has gotten humanity this far and I am happy to see technological advances, in product that makes me happy, that come from our Haxor within, so to speak. It is a big ladder to climb between Idea and Product, one step at a time is the only way. How would one possibly eat an elephant? Tools are required, for catching, skinning, cooking blah blah... and help from folks can be another tool within your toolbox whilst you fly solo dev. Is the statement that the elephant is now too big to catch? It is hard to find other hungry folk to help hunt a big thing? Where is the hunting ground? Where do you get helping from other hungry solo devs to kill an elephant with only your inputs of skill, effort and time?
karterk 4y ago
> My app is officially dead. Most markets are large enough to accommodate several businesses. There's really no reason to stop working on something just because you find that there is already someone solving that same problem. Who knows, they will shut it down at some point, or might head upmarket or pivot to a tangential area.
- Reason077 4y ago
  If you have one project that’s already successful, however, it’s probably best to keep focusing on that and not be distracted by the one that never shipped.
- kevsim 4y ago
  Exactly. In fact, it's even a bit of validation that maybe the market you're trying to address actually exists.
- OJFord 4y ago
  And especially if the would-be competitor is so crap, as described? I don't really understand the leap from 'oh something like this already exists but it sucks' to 'no point shipping any more my life is over blog about it instead'.
- rozenmd 4y ago
  I'm sitting here running the 200th uptime monitoring service, laughing at the notion you have to be first to ship a solution to a problem. Build something good, that people want, and iterate rapidly as feedback comes in.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    I think an uptime monitoring service will be my back up idea. It is like a pizza business, you can always find people who want pizza and who will rave about your pizza. Dominos and Pizza Hut are not a problem.
    - jamil7 4y ago
slimebart 4y ago
Kitze is a nice guy and an entertaining follow. I do think he needs to switch off more, however. He leans into tech in a very emotional way, and is very specific about what he wants. Which are good qualities, but they become bad when you can't switch off. I think at one point he mentioned he stopped listening to learning podcasts when going for daily walks, and instead let his mind rest and enjoy the walk. If anyone feels like they are becoming their own worst enemy with their projects, then that sort of thinking is a good idea. Having said that, he's also very successful with his other project. So he's a good follow, if you don't mind the trolling about web development ;)
- Reason077 4y ago
  I find podcasts very relaxing. So relaxing that I often listen to them to fall asleep, especially ones where the presenter has a nice soothing voice. Very important to turn off the auto-play feature, however!
  - cersa8 4y ago
    I use podcast/audiobooks exclusively to fall asleep. But indeed, the narrator/presenter needs to have a soothing voice and no intro and outro jingles.
onion2k 4y ago
"Maybe this is actually obvious, but it's still a common mistake in startups so I'll say it - you don't have to believe your product is good to start selling; you just have to be better than not having the product. You don't even have to believe it's the best, or believe it's complete, or even like it. People will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain point slightly less painful." Me, 3 hours ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351147
- lbriner 4y ago
  I wouldn't quite agree that people will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain less. There is still oboarding friction, possible import issues, fear of vendor lock-in etc. I think it is something that is easy to describe in theory, "ship what people want", "pivot quickly" etc. but the truth is most of us think we have solved a problem with our product but as soon as the first customer says, "I would buy it if you changed all those things", we quickly get stuck between, "product market fit" and "I am not solving your problem so let's find the customer whose problem I am solving" to avoid creating something that only customer wants.
  - onion2k 4y ago
    There is still oboarding friction, possible import issues, fear of vendor lock-in etc. My point isn't really about the customer - it's about the startup, and the belief that you'll get to where you want to be eventually. Every single reason a founder can come up with not to be out there selling like "The product isn't finished", "It needs feature X", "It's not fast enough", "It needs better design", etc is wrong. No matter how bad your product is, if it's enough to solve the problem a bit then someone will pay for it. Any improvements you can make after that just increases the number of people who'll buy. The fun game of running a startup is to make sure you're finding enough customers to make enough money to pay for building new things that enables you to find more customers, until you're big enough to either be self-sustaining or exit.
    - codingdave 4y ago
nashashmi 4y ago
My only comment here is you got to have thick skin if you want to follow this advice. Once you ship it, you will get a hundred compliments, and thousands of critiques (mostly from the jealous people). When you don't have thick skin, you don't ship. Ever.
- lbriner 4y ago
  So true. I think my biggest negative when it comes to the idea of running a business is that thick skin. Not so obnoxious that you don't take feedback but realistic that opinions are free and come thick and fast! I think this also plays out when people are always comparing themselves to their competitors instead of just concentrating on what they are doing well. Just because "Big Company" does it, doesn't mean it is worthwhile and that they won't pull it in 6 months when they realise they created something useless!
rob74 4y ago
Er, nice story, really entertaining to read, but I think it would benefit from actually mentioning the "competitor" app that he ended up paying money for. I mean, he won't ship his own app anymore, so no harm done in mentioning it, right?
- Reason077 4y ago
  I’m curious too!
- SamBam 4y ago
  I could see that distracting from the main point. Then it becomes "Why were you solving that problem?" "Why did you insult their app, it's really great!" "The author's right, no one should use app X." It's not the point of the story.
  - c03 4y ago
    It's not really a story as it is now though. Someone did something better than this guy. It's just a stream slightly coherent gonzo ranting.
    - samhw 4y ago
      In other words, a story? An account of something that happened to that person? Does he have to state the names of every road he was on and every cafe he went to? I like this site, but the one thing I'll never understand is the outrageously entitled attitudes of so many people when it comes to free content, like fat and delirious blog-reading Ubus.
  - dqpb 4y ago
    Until he adds some actual facts, I’m going to assume the story is not true.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Agreed, you see it all the time on HN, commentors bikeshedding insignificant parts of an article. I'm glad the author didn't put in the competitor in the article.
masto 4y ago
Mine was when the iPhone SDK was released. I’d made a small Mac thing and gone to a few WWDCs, and really wanted to be an app developer. I brainstormed some dumb ideas, but one day I was meeting up with some friends in the city and while waiting for them to show up, I thought “there should be an app for this”. It felt like I got a lot of blank stares when explaining the idea to people, but I went ahead and built a prototype app where you could invite friends to share their location for a limited time, and it would show you where everyone is in realtime on a map. I did a simple backend server to coordinate sending the updates between devices. There was a chat built in so you could tell people your train was running late. I sent it to a few people, we tried it out, I got busy doing other things, and never finished it. My memory may have distorted the timeline, but it felt like a long time before I saw apps like Glympse, Apple’s Find My Friends, or Google location sharing show up. I could have easily gotten that over the line while it was still my idea. Entirely my fault, though.
- johnhenry 4y ago
  Don't feel bad. Even if you had continued with the idea, it may not have worked. In 2013 there was a company called "Twist" that invited users to share their location temporarily so that co-workers could know if they would be on time to meetings. At some point they shuttered most of their employees and decided to pivot into bitcoin as "BitGo". (Note that https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ is an entirely different company now). I joined shortly after the shuttering. One funny thing was that the company still owned twist.com and would continually get emails for an unrelated sex club, twistsf.com.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    And before that one of the founders of BitGo was at Google and and wrote much of the HTTP/2 and SPDY :)
    - johnhenry 4y ago
      Is that you Mike?
qwertox 4y ago
I can relate. And I'm so burned out that I barely have a will to live.
- mromanuk 4y ago
  Hey, have you considered doing therapy?
- alin23 4y ago
  What are you working on? If you poured that much work into it already, I’m genuinely curious about all the details ^_^
block_dagger 4y ago
Could have done without the violence expressed in the opening.
- jaywalk 4y ago
scottndecker 4y ago
Not the saddest; just the most recurring "just ship it" story ever.
- zild3d 4y ago
  yeah this is the "just ship it" story with 1000 faces, not the saddest by any means
- CRConrad 4y ago
  Strictly speaking, one doesn't preclude the other. Sure, there could be other reasons this can't be "the saddest" such story, but just being common doesn't logically seem to be one.
mcv 4y ago
When my oldest son was still young, I was working on my first Android game: a memory game about recognising letters, words, or anything. With a voice saying the letter, word, etc, so children would learn to match the symbol with the sound. I thought it would help my son learn to read, but before I knew it, he could read already. (At 4 or something. Never had to teach him a thing.) I lost my purpose and stopped working on it. Years later, we had another child. Deep into his struggles with talking, and later reading, I finally remembered that unfinished app again. Didn't know where it was, didn't want to restart it, and really the ideal moment for my second son to start using it was 2 years ago, so I didn't even bother.
ciccionamente 4y ago
Most of the time "just intensely search first any competitor" before "start shipping it" works fine.
cwoolfe 4y ago
This article was funny and had a good moral wrapped in it. The part where he pays his competitor is priceless. "A tear rolled down my cheek for every single digit of my credit card that I entered in their app"
- maxverse 4y ago
  Also my favorite part. Poetry.
hoodwink 4y ago
what app is he talking about?
- openplatypus 4y ago
  We will never know. He didn't ship it ;)
chalst 4y ago
To save dang the effort, we had this story when it came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23774521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23774521 Of its 160 comments, this stands out: > I'm in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me run that business profitably. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775784
ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
I've only ever "shipped" two independent projects, and they are the the best things I have ever done for myself in terms of development, both from a personal career growth perspective but even financially. I work at a nonprofit and I had done some ABSURDLY SIMPLE data analysis on a relatively annoying public data set to consume. I'd done it for our institution, but it was sort of straightforward to generalize it to any institution for which this would be applicable. The code was... awful. Rather than doing it "properly," since I already had all the code I had written to do the analysis for my institution, I literally just ran it on the entire data set (10GB or so) for every organization that existed and then just put some result file on S3. My "site" would just let folks search for their institution, and present the data with a couple graphs, some nice visuals, and have them print it out. I was ashamed of it in a technical sense. But I just bought a domain and tweeted at a journalist. Whelp, two weeks later, I had my picture in the city's biggest paper, my org got some positive press, did a service for other non-profits, had folks reaching out to me about jobs, etc. It took SO LITTLE effort, and every instinct I had was that it was bad and I shouldn't publish it. But the reality is I had already done 95% of the work... committing to just do the extra 5% was so hard to do, but in hindsight, so obviously amazing ROI, even if it hadn't gotten the attention it did. Secondly, I built a reading app for a teacher at my school to let him do an activity where kids would jumble up sentences and paragraphs in order to help them understand transition words. The only reason I agree to try to do this was that I was learning React at the time and wanted to play with the React drag and drop library. After a weekend, I had it essentially working, and it was a success in his classroom. And here, too, it was to be the end of it... but I pushed myself through it, added a simple login mechanic, user account, etc. I had a small technical question as I was wrapping up, and I posted it on reddit. Someone who worked at a nonprofit mentioned to me that the app could potentially qualify for a grant that the Verizon foundation was running for learning apps. I applied... and we got it. The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Really... just ship it!
- alin23 4y ago
  The first project sounds like you just thought of a really clever caching mechanism :) if the data rarely changes and the cache is still valid then why not, I think you did find the “proper” way to do it! As programmers we tend to want to generalize a lot, when in fact you can get to 80% of solving the real pain of a task with the first 20% of the work. The rest of the work can usually be done by a human much faster and with more trust than a three-thousand-if-elif-else solution would get.
seiferteric 4y ago
I've had this experience several times. The one that hurts the most I think was one I worked on with a friend called VRwalkthru that we wanted to sell as a service to real-estate agents and people selling their houses. You used a special camera to take pano photos throughout a property and keep track of your movements and directions in an app (it used accelerator / compass data). Then the photos would be converted to photo-spheres and arrows would be added you could click on the move to the next spot like google street view so you could "walk through" a property listing. We got a prototype working and sent cold emails to a bunch of real-estate agents and got... nothing, maybe one luke-warm response. We eventually gave up. That was about 2011, then a few years later along came matterport and I see it on practically every listing I look at.. oh well. I guess we didn't know how or who to sell it to, or it was not good or professional enough, I don't know...
- nradov 4y ago
  You should have established personal relationships with a few local agents and then offered to do all the work yourselves for free to add that service to their listings. If it worked well that would have given you some positive references, or at least feedback on how to improve.
alin23 4y ago
If you want to get paid, projects will need a lot of non-coding work after coding the basic features: presentation website, payment/licensing, contact forms, ProductHunt/HN launch, copy text (have you ever tried to fit what your product solves in two short sentences?) One good strategy I found accidentally through Lunar (https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi) is to launch for free, prioritizing the contact form, and letting people know that you’ll want to make the product paid in the future. After all the user feedback, the product will probably look very different from the first free version and most people will want to pay for the new polished version. Some will feel betrayed, but as long as you’re keeping the old free version available, you’re not doing anything wrong. I shared Lunar for free for 4 years before doing a huge paid update with Apple Silicon support and a ton of user feedback implemented. Most people were happy to pay and I’m now doing Lunar full time, earning around $3.5k a month, and the best part is that Lunar v1 only needed about one week of work to see that it solves a real problem. Even Kitze himself liked it: https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/1464203795030761477 https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/1464203795030761477
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Lunar is a great app! I've been using it along with Vivid.
  - alin23 4y ago
    Thanks! Not sure if you’re aware but Lunar also has XDR Brightness: https://lunar.fyi/#xdr https://lunar.fyi/#xdr In fact the feature landed in Lunar before Vivid launched and it uses a different approach that increases the brightness for the whole system instead of only for what’s behind an overlay like Vivid does (although the overlay also has its own advantages like being able to only increase brightness for a single window etc. ) It can be activated in the same way as Vivid: increase brightness over 100%
    - cercatrova 4y ago
      Yep, that was why I installed Lunar as well. I was evaluating the various options, between Vivid, Lunar and BetterDummy since they all have the XDR feature.
pueblito 4y ago
I had this great idea to make a Linux distro with a ranching theme centered on containers. I had a great little basic system going with tons of fun ranching puns; I called the containers cows and so there was roundup and branding and slaughter etc. I even put ASCII barbed wire fences comments to divide sections of code. Man I felt so defeated when I found out RancherOS was a thing, but without the whimsy
tantalor 4y ago
The smallest "tiny violin playing just for you" ever
neoyagami 4y ago
Now im going to shipit
LVanguard 4y ago
I had this experience a couple of months ago when I noticed a gap in the shopify app ecosystem. I saw some comments discussing this need, found nothing in the store, and had a friend starting a shop that could potentially use it as well. Worked on the app for 2-3 months, polishing, coding, learning tailwind and a bit of formal UI design in the process. Kept thinking "It's not ready yet. Just needs this hook into the UI. Needs React. Needs a Rails backend. Needs built in email support"... As you can guess, I never shipped. Fast forward 7 months later and I found myself browsing the store again, and yep, found TWO applications in the store that solved the same issue I was attempting to solve months earlier. With installs, and reviews! Got pretty down on myself for a couple of days with the author's same sense of happiness, doubt, sadness.. I'm working on another application where the same 'hesitate to ship' tendencies started rearing their ugly heads. I've started experimenting with just setting deadlines for shipping, feature complete, etc. I'm submitting the app to Shopify today. And no, I don't consider it anywhere near 'ready'.
- rukuu001 4y ago
  The most affirming thing in the world is making something and then selling it. The second most affirming thing in the world is watching someone make the exact thing you thought of and then selling it.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    Why is selling it affirming? I never got a huge amount of satisfaction from selling things. Giving things away always brought me more satisfaction. In fact, putting a price tag on something I was giving away always seemed like step 1 towards no longer caring about it.
- sillycube 4y ago
  Always focus on your advantages. When they launch earlier, of course they can enjoy early users. As a late comer in the market, you can observe what they miss and compensate their weaknesses. You save yourself time because you can study from them
- hgomersall 4y ago
DethNinja 4y ago
Why not release it regardless? Many SaaS offerings have competition, you don’t have to aim for a field where competition doesn’t exist. In fact, no competition is usually red flag about the idea.
Markstar 4y ago
I'm a bit in a similar boat: My wife's department (university) asked me for a 'little' favor, which I programmed in Java to get back into programming after ~4 years of being a stay-at-home dad. After finishing the prototype in 2019, we made the life-changing decision to focus on making it a program that we want to sell. Decided to go C++ and Electron, but with the corona virus and me taking forever to learn all the skills, I still haven't released it as of now. :( However, I'm still working on it and hope to release it in time for a conference that I signed up for, so this will be a 'make or break' year for me.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Make sure they don't claim copyright on your code.
  - Markstar 4y ago
    Thank you for the heads up, but I don't see how. They were not part of the development and have no financial involvement. Hmm, now that I think about it, I am going to the conference as affiliate of the university... :/
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      All it would take is that they specified what to build and claimed that you never sent them an invoice but that it was work for hire regardless. Remember that they are much bigger than you and if there is money involved they may well act irrational, and as a smaller party this can be very unnerving and costly. Best to make sure that you have it spelled out that the code is yours, stick a big fat copyright sign on top of it and if possible get them on the record that it is clear that the rights belong to you. When in doubt, consult and IP lawyer.
      - Markstar 4y ago
        Again, thanks for taking the time to write! It is certainly good advice! Luckily the situation is in this specific case is that I don't have to worry about it - I'm 100% sure of it. My nightmares come more from the fear that I will finish one day and find out that I took too long and I missed my window of opportunity.
sbayeta 4y ago
This had me laughing loudly, and sadly. Really super good article, give it a read if you haven't shipped because of reasons
pcwelder 4y ago
I have an opposite story. I created a reddit bot that recommended some words to the users on https://reddit.com/r/whatstheword https://reddit.com/r/whatstheword subreddit posts. I could've done a lot of things to improve quality, but it looked good as a first draft and shipped it following that philosophy. It turned out to be buggy, and the bot ended up getting banned after an overnight run. So I think "just ship it" applies only in a large market where you can recover, and losing a few customers is expected.
- s_dev 4y ago
  How would you know that the bot would have been banned without shipping? What is preventing you from improving and re-releasing the bot? Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping.
  - pcwelder 4y ago
    I don't want to circumvent the ban by creating a new account, it's against the rules, and mods will ban it without considering anything else. I could try convincing the mods, but it'll not be easy. > Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping I did get fast feedback and fresh views on what's lacking, and it was a good learning experience. But if I were to do it again, I'd spent 4x the time to include more functionality and do extensive testing.
Dave3of5 4y ago
> I started building an app on 01.01.2018. It was New Year's Eve and we just had the crappiest night ever. Yes, imagine a night so bad that at midnight you decide "you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna work on WEB DEVELOPMENT". That bad. Am I the only one that actually enjoys development ? I do development for fun in my free time, often with things that are completely throw away.
- Tijdreiziger 4y ago
  I enjoy coding when I have a problem code can solve. (Sometimes I enjoy it a little too much, and before I know it I've skipped dinner.) I don't think I'd code just for the sake of it, though.
- corobo 4y ago
  There are multiple types of development I LOVE tinkering with silly bots or automations I’ve come up with to solve a problem I’m having for sure! I’d happily chuck away a weekend even if it’s just preliminary work that ends up scrapped. This is fun! I don’t love everything dev I do for pay, that often comes more under the “well, the bills do need paying..” category Not because it’s bad or unethical or whatever, don’t get me wrong, it’s just going to be basically the same tasks I did for the last site. Not as fun.
camillomiller 4y ago
Or "perfect is the enemy of done"
quickthrower2 4y ago
He has a competitor, but he can still ship now … right? Sounds like he has intimate product knowledge and knows the pain points. Maybe pivot to the thing that people who buy the competing product need?
steffs 4y ago
The realness here is palpable
rglover 4y ago
> "After 2 years of development, juggling between the fucking horror that's the web platform, React Native, Expo, GraphQL, bitching about how there's no ideal tech stack, the good old jQuery and Filezilla days, switching to other projects, releasing other apps, losing passion, finding passion, coming back to the app, etc. etc. etc..." There is now. https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick
jschveibinz 4y ago
“The MVP was ready in a few days. I'm not that good of a coder, it's just a simple app.” This sentence is incredibly important. If a MVP is ready in 3 days, then how valuable can that product be? When literally everyone has access to tools that they believe can result in something marketable in only a few days, then we have achieved the time when nobody makes money from software. Thoughts?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Multiplayer 4y ago
  The MVP is just the beginning of the journey. A toe-hold in a market space you are about to explore. The MVP gives you your first data set to work with. I know very few people willing to commit to the long journey of making something. Even fewer that will bother marketing it. There is lots of money in this banana stand!
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  > If a MVP is ready in 3 days, then how valuable can that product be? How long do you think it took to come up with a prototype for Tinder? A bunch of photos, a blurb of text, geolocation/distance calculation, you like or dislike a profile, and a messaging function. The slight, simple spin on grindr - showing a stack you HAD to make your way through - instead of grindr's grid - launched them into the stratosphere.
  - jschveibinz 4y ago
    I agree. But the use of the phrase MVP in place of the phrase “initial prototype” is what I am probing. I think that the misuse of “MVP” distorts the understanding of the long and difficult process of developing and marketing a “viable” software product.
- lostcolony 4y ago
  If you stop at the MVP, agreed. The implication is either what you have in an MVP is good enough no one will compete, or that you'll keep moving forward with it once you get any sort of validation.
esjeon 4y ago
This is just a personal viewpoint, but I think the era of "just ship it" will be gone after a decade or so. * Software "development" skill will become so common and cheap that simple tools won't get any market. * The market will be dictated by tools instead of code content. * Language-as-a-service will be a thing, as it allows customers to fill in business requirements AND allows the backing company to perform engineering behind the scene.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- loh 4y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree, and I may even be working on what you're describing here, which I wrote a little bit about on my company blog (bit of a shameless plug, sorry): https://blog.molecule.dev/system-integration-tool-not-framework https://blog.molecule.dev/system-integration-tool-not-framew...
dcow 4y ago
While there’s clearly some nugget of advice in this rant, I can’t help but find it really cringe to the point of wondering if the author has mental or psychological issues. They are literally sitting here telling everyone else to ship their shit but they won’t ship their shit. Talk about bad ways to lead. Does the author want a pity party? I’m just really confused what I’m supposed to take away as the reader from all the self flagellation. Is it an effective literary tactic for people?
openplatypus 4y ago
I got stuck on weird integration with the payment processor. This, plus a few other minor issues set me back two months. No biggy, right? Wrong. I have shipped B2B product in late November. Came in December downtime. Close to 4-5 months wasted because I delayed shipping. Till day I slap myself in the face for that.
- loh 4y ago
  This kind of thing happens way too often and is one of the problems my startup (Molecule.dev) solves. May I ask which payment processor?
sillycube 4y ago
It doesn't matter at all. When you see the landing page of the product and some existing customers, it means that the market is valdiated. You can still release your product and catch up. With a competitor working in the market, it's just like a north star. You can execute as fast as possible to get some customers. I think the op is intrigued by his ego. The existing product is a good inspiration to valdiate his assumption
jonnypotty 4y ago
Shit man. That sucks.
donatj 4y ago
I have been working on a side project for going on 12 years now. In that time a bunch of competitors popped up. I gave up on the idea several times. All the competitors shut down their public APIs though, which is why I started up on it again about 5 years ago. I've got it in a place I really like. I use it daily. The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme. I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that. The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted. The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.
- lloydatkinson 4y ago
  What is it?
- hansonw 4y ago
  plug in https://www.etebase.com/ https://www.etebase.com/ and ship it :D
  - donatj 4y ago
    Huh, interesting. That's actually not a horrible idea.
tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
I started working on the project (one that I'm currently working on) around the beginning of 2021. I stopped though after a month because the alpha version I made looked terrible (and got some mean reviews on places) and I thought maybe the product just doesn't fit in anywhere. I got contacted by a few VCs, upon realizing my crappy project had some potential, I started working on it again, regularly started contacting the potential users, launched 3 private versions until July 2021. The bunch of users I had liked it but then... I stopped updating it and it eventually sorta died. I just couldn't get out of the private beta in time. Stopped working on it for ~8 months. Recently got in a startup pipeline program of a large accelerator for this project which made me realize how stupid I am to keep throwing cool opportunities that come my way. So, now I'm back at it hoping to get out of that grim cycle of not shipping on time. I've got the 2.0 version of my project in works shipping later this month. And, luckily enough, all those old private users (and new developers I started contacting again) really do want to get their hands on the 2.0 version. Hopefully, this ends well for a "shipping story".
texasviking 4y ago
Hits me in the feels. In 2011 I had an idea for a ceramic coffee mug with a threaded base. then build a screw on base with heating element, battery, and QI charger. Screw the base on, set it on a QI charge pad... voila "always hot coffee". When you're done for the day, unscrew the base, put the mug in the dishwasher. Rinse, repeat. For a year I researched getting a prototype built, castings, etc. Finally decided to just abandon it. Just drink coffee faster and it won't get cold. Now I have 2 Ember mugs and an Ember travel thermos. Still can't dishwash it, but dang it's useful.
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  Why does it need to screw into the heater? I picked up a coffee mug heating plate at a garage sale for $3. Works great.
rawfan 4y ago
I built a really shitty version of linkedin for people in my school to stay in touch after graduation (in 1998 i think). People were really using it and pressing me to improve on it. I just didn't care and at some time just deleted it (angering many friends). No regrets, though. I was definitely not ready to take the idea any further, back then.
brundolf 4y ago
I'm waffling on when to "ship" the programming language I've been working on for the past couple years. I think it could be something real and useful, but there are still things I want to add/redesign/fix before I officially thrust it out into the world as an alpha version. But I'm worried about killing the initial spark of enthusiasm when people try to use it and it's still broken. Or when they start building on it and then I redesign some language feature and their code doesn't work in newer versions. I wonder if it's a different question for something like a language, or whether I'm just getting sucked into the classic fallacy
- danenania 4y ago
  Shipping isn't a binary and it isn't something you can only do once. If the project is still very rough, "shipping" may just mean emailing it to 20 people you think might be interested. Getting reactions from real people is the key thing, not publicizing it far and wide--in many cases it is smart to wait on that until you've gone through a bunch of iterations with a small number of early users. For example, you could post a link to your language right here. Not that many people will see it, but some of the ones that do may give you useful feedback and start keeping tabs on the project. There isn't much downside.
goatcode 4y ago
Having experienced this very thing, I can say: there's a good chance the other guys had already made their app in some form long before this guy did. Don't worry, bro: everyone has had a cool idea (all of which are very cheap -- ideas, that is) and then seen someone else doing it later. The good news is this though: if you're dishonest and connected enough, you can still make your app succeed. Especially if it's worse than your competitors'. I have a strong suspicion that that's how it's usually done.
- bogwog 4y ago
  > if you're dishonest and connected enough, you can still make your app succeed. Especially if it's worse than your competitors'. Wtf is that supposed to mean?
  - goatcode 4y ago
    That nepotism and sociopathy rule the tech business world the same way they rule most any other business world.
czhu12 4y ago
The tone of this post suggests that if the author simply just shipped, they would be as successful as the competitor. Building successful products is not a matter of “shipping” but also promoting, selling, continually improving, studying user behaviors, providing customer support and engaging potential customers. Given that the author wasn’t even motivated enough to ship when all these other tasks weren’t even applicable yet, I can’t imagine they would be motivated to do all the work after shipping. Frankly, this is a good thing. I’ve never been more stressed than when I’ve managed to ship a product, picked up a tiny number of paying customers, and subsequently realized that many hundreds of more hours would have to be poured into the product to make it truly useful. You slowly start working on it, customers are upset and start churning, and you’re constantly questioning whether it’s worth it anymore to keep pushing. The most success I’ve ever had was building something I personally thought is fun and interesting with 0 expectations of money or profit, customers be damned. I’m building https://mintables.club https://mintables.club right now, sometimes I pick it up for a few hours on a weekend, often I ignore it for weeks, but I visit it all the time because I love the artwork people upload. There’s tons of competitors that do similar things, even before I started it, but I couldn’t care less.
- vagab0nd 4y ago
  Came here to say this. One more thing to add: it's very likely that there are more competitors out there than the author realizes, and even more failed attempts at the same problem that the author never sees. I've made the mistake of (falsely) convincing myself that what I was building was unique, probably because I wanted it to be true. It was rather stupid, but it's a mistake I will never make again.
megablast 4y ago
Built it in 2 days, then it took 2 years to rebuild.
rubenhak 4y ago
It might be a good opportunity to talk to them and join the team.
ZephyrOhm 4y ago
Great story. Wonderful humor. Candid honesty. Appreciated
simonblack 4y ago
What is sad when you have an idea. You just know it will work, but you can't afford to develop it yourself. And you tell yourself that there's no way that anybody else will think of your idea and, worse, patent it! This was one of mine. I invented it in 1978, when I built a house with a pool in the central atrium. You want that swimming pool to be both indoors and outdoors at the same time. Note the year that "they" invented it. https://vergola.com/ https://vergola.com/ Pardon me while I just slink off and cry.

571 points by cercatrova 4y ago

calltrak 4y ago

techplex 4y ago

I know it doesn't matter for the point the author is trying to make but, Such a tease, what does the app do?

Chris2048 4y ago
Given they got suspicious about if their idea was stolen, it'd be interesting if the app solves something unique, or some very common problem.
- paxys 4y ago
  Yeah I'm fully expecting it to be something like a project management app. There are tons of ideas which you think are unique, but many, many others have them as well, because they run into all the same problems as you in their day to day life.
mynegation 4y ago
I remember he at some point had a landing page for a browser that would show you a web page in multiple resolutions, all at once, with hot reload. Not sure if this is the application, he might have had another one.
- bambax 4y ago
  Yes, he made Sizzy, and it's apparently very successful. Here's the story (quite well told I think): https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent

pflenker 4y ago

A big fallacy that I always see - and that is implied by this post - is that the work ends after shipping, a.k.a. "build it and they will come". That doesn't happen any more. So after you "ship" it, you need to promote it, advertise it, create buzz around it and make people use it. And that is a totally different kind of beast than coding something. But on the flip side, if you develop a side project just for yourself, you most certainly learn something. Heck, the author explicitly mentioned learning React Native, which is absolutely great and definitely worth investing time into. Learning things is valuable in itself.

aliswe 4y ago
most importantly you also need to continue developing it
Chris2048 4y ago
Yes, Given they couldn't develop the app without planning the release, I wonder if they'd have time to properly support it if they shipped..
OrwellianTimes 4y ago
'So I deployed it on Vercel, bought a domain name and posted it on the brand twitter account we created a few days ago. Why am I not getting users?'
bambax 4y ago
> "build it and they will come" I also used to think that build it and they will come was a big fallacy, but it's not really. The fallacy is, "build it and the whole world will fight to get what you built". That sure won't happen by itself or by chance. But if you build something reasonably good, some people will come. That may not be enough for you to make a living out of it, but it will make it worthwhile. > Learning things is valuable in itself. From the same author: > Open source, writing blog posts, and playing with tweaking lint settings and editor themes all day are completely fine until your landlord knocks on your door or you're at the checkout at the grocery store. You're doing a crazy 2-hour commute every day telling yourself "well at least I'm learning a lot about SVG". Fuck that. https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent https://kitze.io/posts/github-stars-wont-pay-your-rent (I am actually, currently learning a lot about SVG and love it; but the quote is right that it's not paying the rent.)

darkteflon 4y ago

From the headline, honestly I thought this was going to involve a death.

Tabular-Iceberg 4y ago
Yes, I would say the “just ship the Therac-25 with the Therac-20 firmware” to be a few degrees sadder.
llampx 4y ago
I actually thought it was going to involve a Boeing product manager. /potshot

martindbp 4y ago

Yep, I'm there, been going for a year, it's amazing how quickly time passes by. Getting ready to ship, for realsies this time. Maybe I'm imagining, but due to the unimaginable number of apps and SaaS out there today, it's not as easy to put out something you're embarrassed about. The only way to do that is to have something extremely small and polished, in which case it's almost certainly been done already multiple times. I'm sure there are some niches still to be filled, but it sure was easier back in, say, 2012.

op00to 4y ago
You can do it! HN believes in you.
krallja 4y ago
> it sure was easier back in, say, 2012 I was on HN in 2012. It was not any easier. People said the same thing back then. “Oh, if only I had gotten started in 2005, with DHTML, when things were easier.” “I wish I was paying attention when iPhone app store came out.” Just because you missed one boat doesn’t mean you’ll miss the next one. Keep an eye out for it. «History merely repeats itself. It has all been done before. Nothing under the sun is truly new.»
- martindbp 4y ago
  I hope you're right!
  - krallja 4y ago
    “Now when I got to Hollywood, I was discouraged with animation. I didn’t think I’d ever do another animated thing. I said, I think I’m getting in it too late. Felix the Cat was going then, [and] other things, and I just said, it’s too late. I should have been in the business six years before.” — Walt Disney

batch12 4y ago

It still isn't too late to finish the app/site and put it out there. Instead, it seems that the author burned out. With that said, there's no shame in dropping the project to stay sane.

simmo9000 4y ago

"... fuck it, I'm gonna work on WEB DEVELOPMENT. That bad." I hear you!

op00to 4y ago

This article made me so sad - the author really doesn't need to be as hard on themselves as they are!

rob74 4y ago
I think he was exaggerating to make it a more interesting read. Or, at least, I hope so...

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

Kinda feel the app that managed to ship deserved a shoutout in this. Your idea is already out there, the value is 0.

frontman1988 4y ago

Being a solo dev on some app/website is not really worth it these days. There was a time when you could single-handedly create a million dollar app in some niche. But now the competition has increased so much that you need VC money or atleast a team if you want to create any impact whatsoever.

slimebart 4y ago
I don't believe this. A solo developer can create a more focused product, with less features, and still do well for themselves. Once you accept VC money you need to do well for the entire company, and the expectation is to be less niche to meet many users. Just talking very generally.
jetbooster 4y ago
Is this not debunked by Wordle's success? That was a single dev effort, and sold for multiple millions.
llampx 4y ago
If your only KPI is "Am I at unicorn valuation yet?" then yes, but I'm sure you can do well being a small fish in a big pond. There are still underserved markets out there. Find your niche and build your product around it.
simmo9000 4y ago
I think this is a valid comment questioning where one puts their goalpost for their realisation of a funded MVP coming from their idea. The market has shifted alot from what it was 5 years ago... 10 years, 15, 20, 30... Ideas are what has gotten humanity this far and I am happy to see technological advances, in product that makes me happy, that come from our Haxor within, so to speak. It is a big ladder to climb between Idea and Product, one step at a time is the only way. How would one possibly eat an elephant? Tools are required, for catching, skinning, cooking blah blah... and help from folks can be another tool within your toolbox whilst you fly solo dev. Is the statement that the elephant is now too big to catch? It is hard to find other hungry folk to help hunt a big thing? Where is the hunting ground? Where do you get helping from other hungry solo devs to kill an elephant with only your inputs of skill, effort and time?

karterk 4y ago

> My app is officially dead. Most markets are large enough to accommodate several businesses. There's really no reason to stop working on something just because you find that there is already someone solving that same problem. Who knows, they will shut it down at some point, or might head upmarket or pivot to a tangential area.

Reason077 4y ago
If you have one project that’s already successful, however, it’s probably best to keep focusing on that and not be distracted by the one that never shipped.
kevsim 4y ago
Exactly. In fact, it's even a bit of validation that maybe the market you're trying to address actually exists.
OJFord 4y ago
And especially if the would-be competitor is so crap, as described? I don't really understand the leap from 'oh something like this already exists but it sucks' to 'no point shipping any more my life is over blog about it instead'.
rozenmd 4y ago
I'm sitting here running the 200th uptime monitoring service, laughing at the notion you have to be first to ship a solution to a problem. Build something good, that people want, and iterate rapidly as feedback comes in.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  I think an uptime monitoring service will be my back up idea. It is like a pizza business, you can always find people who want pizza and who will rave about your pizza. Dominos and Pizza Hut are not a problem.
  - jamil7 4y ago

slimebart 4y ago

Kitze is a nice guy and an entertaining follow. I do think he needs to switch off more, however. He leans into tech in a very emotional way, and is very specific about what he wants. Which are good qualities, but they become bad when you can't switch off. I think at one point he mentioned he stopped listening to learning podcasts when going for daily walks, and instead let his mind rest and enjoy the walk. If anyone feels like they are becoming their own worst enemy with their projects, then that sort of thinking is a good idea. Having said that, he's also very successful with his other project. So he's a good follow, if you don't mind the trolling about web development ;)

Reason077 4y ago
I find podcasts very relaxing. So relaxing that I often listen to them to fall asleep, especially ones where the presenter has a nice soothing voice. Very important to turn off the auto-play feature, however!
- cersa8 4y ago
  I use podcast/audiobooks exclusively to fall asleep. But indeed, the narrator/presenter needs to have a soothing voice and no intro and outro jingles.

onion2k 4y ago

"Maybe this is actually obvious, but it's still a common mistake in startups so I'll say it - you don't have to believe your product is good to start selling; you just have to be better than not having the product. You don't even have to believe it's the best, or believe it's complete, or even like it. People will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain point slightly less painful." Me, 3 hours ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31351147

lbriner 4y ago
I wouldn't quite agree that people will happily give you money for anything that makes their pain less. There is still oboarding friction, possible import issues, fear of vendor lock-in etc. I think it is something that is easy to describe in theory, "ship what people want", "pivot quickly" etc. but the truth is most of us think we have solved a problem with our product but as soon as the first customer says, "I would buy it if you changed all those things", we quickly get stuck between, "product market fit" and "I am not solving your problem so let's find the customer whose problem I am solving" to avoid creating something that only customer wants.
- onion2k 4y ago
  There is still oboarding friction, possible import issues, fear of vendor lock-in etc. My point isn't really about the customer - it's about the startup, and the belief that you'll get to where you want to be eventually. Every single reason a founder can come up with not to be out there selling like "The product isn't finished", "It needs feature X", "It's not fast enough", "It needs better design", etc is wrong. No matter how bad your product is, if it's enough to solve the problem a bit then someone will pay for it. Any improvements you can make after that just increases the number of people who'll buy. The fun game of running a startup is to make sure you're finding enough customers to make enough money to pay for building new things that enables you to find more customers, until you're big enough to either be self-sustaining or exit.
  - codingdave 4y ago

nashashmi 4y ago

My only comment here is you got to have thick skin if you want to follow this advice. Once you ship it, you will get a hundred compliments, and thousands of critiques (mostly from the jealous people). When you don't have thick skin, you don't ship. Ever.

lbriner 4y ago
So true. I think my biggest negative when it comes to the idea of running a business is that thick skin. Not so obnoxious that you don't take feedback but realistic that opinions are free and come thick and fast! I think this also plays out when people are always comparing themselves to their competitors instead of just concentrating on what they are doing well. Just because "Big Company" does it, doesn't mean it is worthwhile and that they won't pull it in 6 months when they realise they created something useless!

rob74 4y ago

Er, nice story, really entertaining to read, but I think it would benefit from actually mentioning the "competitor" app that he ended up paying money for. I mean, he won't ship his own app anymore, so no harm done in mentioning it, right?

Reason077 4y ago
I’m curious too!
SamBam 4y ago
I could see that distracting from the main point. Then it becomes "Why were you solving that problem?" "Why did you insult their app, it's really great!" "The author's right, no one should use app X." It's not the point of the story.
- c03 4y ago
  It's not really a story as it is now though. Someone did something better than this guy. It's just a stream slightly coherent gonzo ranting.
  - samhw 4y ago
    In other words, a story? An account of something that happened to that person? Does he have to state the names of every road he was on and every cafe he went to? I like this site, but the one thing I'll never understand is the outrageously entitled attitudes of so many people when it comes to free content, like fat and delirious blog-reading Ubus.
- dqpb 4y ago
  Until he adds some actual facts, I’m going to assume the story is not true.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  Agreed, you see it all the time on HN, commentors bikeshedding insignificant parts of an article. I'm glad the author didn't put in the competitor in the article.

masto 4y ago

Mine was when the iPhone SDK was released. I’d made a small Mac thing and gone to a few WWDCs, and really wanted to be an app developer. I brainstormed some dumb ideas, but one day I was meeting up with some friends in the city and while waiting for them to show up, I thought “there should be an app for this”. It felt like I got a lot of blank stares when explaining the idea to people, but I went ahead and built a prototype app where you could invite friends to share their location for a limited time, and it would show you where everyone is in realtime on a map. I did a simple backend server to coordinate sending the updates between devices. There was a chat built in so you could tell people your train was running late. I sent it to a few people, we tried it out, I got busy doing other things, and never finished it. My memory may have distorted the timeline, but it felt like a long time before I saw apps like Glympse, Apple’s Find My Friends, or Google location sharing show up. I could have easily gotten that over the line while it was still my idea. Entirely my fault, though.

johnhenry 4y ago
Don't feel bad. Even if you had continued with the idea, it may not have worked. In 2013 there was a company called "Twist" that invited users to share their location temporarily so that co-workers could know if they would be on time to meetings. At some point they shuttered most of their employees and decided to pivot into bitcoin as "BitGo". (Note that https://twist.com/ https://twist.com/ is an entirely different company now). I joined shortly after the shuttering. One funny thing was that the company still owned twist.com and would continually get emails for an unrelated sex club, twistsf.com.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  And before that one of the founders of BitGo was at Google and and wrote much of the HTTP/2 and SPDY :)
  - johnhenry 4y ago
    Is that you Mike?

qwertox 4y ago

I can relate. And I'm so burned out that I barely have a will to live.

mromanuk 4y ago
Hey, have you considered doing therapy?
alin23 4y ago
What are you working on? If you poured that much work into it already, I’m genuinely curious about all the details ^_^

block_dagger 4y ago

Could have done without the violence expressed in the opening.

jaywalk 4y ago

scottndecker 4y ago

Not the saddest; just the most recurring "just ship it" story ever.

zild3d 4y ago
yeah this is the "just ship it" story with 1000 faces, not the saddest by any means
CRConrad 4y ago
Strictly speaking, one doesn't preclude the other. Sure, there could be other reasons this can't be "the saddest" such story, but just being common doesn't logically seem to be one.

mcv 4y ago

When my oldest son was still young, I was working on my first Android game: a memory game about recognising letters, words, or anything. With a voice saying the letter, word, etc, so children would learn to match the symbol with the sound. I thought it would help my son learn to read, but before I knew it, he could read already. (At 4 or something. Never had to teach him a thing.) I lost my purpose and stopped working on it. Years later, we had another child. Deep into his struggles with talking, and later reading, I finally remembered that unfinished app again. Didn't know where it was, didn't want to restart it, and really the ideal moment for my second son to start using it was 2 years ago, so I didn't even bother.

ciccionamente 4y ago

Most of the time "just intensely search first any competitor" before "start shipping it" works fine.

cwoolfe 4y ago

This article was funny and had a good moral wrapped in it. The part where he pays his competitor is priceless. "A tear rolled down my cheek for every single digit of my credit card that I entered in their app"

maxverse 4y ago
Also my favorite part. Poetry.

hoodwink 4y ago

what app is he talking about?

openplatypus 4y ago
We will never know. He didn't ship it ;)

chalst 4y ago

To save dang the effort, we had this story when it came out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23774521 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23774521 Of its 160 comments, this stands out: > I'm in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me run that business profitably. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23775784

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago

I've only ever "shipped" two independent projects, and they are the the best things I have ever done for myself in terms of development, both from a personal career growth perspective but even financially. I work at a nonprofit and I had done some ABSURDLY SIMPLE data analysis on a relatively annoying public data set to consume. I'd done it for our institution, but it was sort of straightforward to generalize it to any institution for which this would be applicable. The code was... awful. Rather than doing it "properly," since I already had all the code I had written to do the analysis for my institution, I literally just ran it on the entire data set (10GB or so) for every organization that existed and then just put some result file on S3. My "site" would just let folks search for their institution, and present the data with a couple graphs, some nice visuals, and have them print it out. I was ashamed of it in a technical sense. But I just bought a domain and tweeted at a journalist. Whelp, two weeks later, I had my picture in the city's biggest paper, my org got some positive press, did a service for other non-profits, had folks reaching out to me about jobs, etc. It took SO LITTLE effort, and every instinct I had was that it was bad and I shouldn't publish it. But the reality is I had already done 95% of the work... committing to just do the extra 5% was so hard to do, but in hindsight, so obviously amazing ROI, even if it hadn't gotten the attention it did. Secondly, I built a reading app for a teacher at my school to let him do an activity where kids would jumble up sentences and paragraphs in order to help them understand transition words. The only reason I agree to try to do this was that I was learning React at the time and wanted to play with the React drag and drop library. After a weekend, I had it essentially working, and it was a success in his classroom. And here, too, it was to be the end of it... but I pushed myself through it, added a simple login mechanic, user account, etc. I had a small technical question as I was wrapping up, and I posted it on reddit. Someone who worked at a nonprofit mentioned to me that the app could potentially qualify for a grant that the Verizon foundation was running for learning apps. I applied... and we got it. The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Really... just ship it!

alin23 4y ago
The first project sounds like you just thought of a really clever caching mechanism :) if the data rarely changes and the cache is still valid then why not, I think you did find the “proper” way to do it! As programmers we tend to want to generalize a lot, when in fact you can get to 80% of solving the real pain of a task with the first 20% of the work. The rest of the work can usually be done by a human much faster and with more trust than a three-thousand-if-elif-else solution would get.

seiferteric 4y ago

I've had this experience several times. The one that hurts the most I think was one I worked on with a friend called VRwalkthru that we wanted to sell as a service to real-estate agents and people selling their houses. You used a special camera to take pano photos throughout a property and keep track of your movements and directions in an app (it used accelerator / compass data). Then the photos would be converted to photo-spheres and arrows would be added you could click on the move to the next spot like google street view so you could "walk through" a property listing. We got a prototype working and sent cold emails to a bunch of real-estate agents and got... nothing, maybe one luke-warm response. We eventually gave up. That was about 2011, then a few years later along came matterport and I see it on practically every listing I look at.. oh well. I guess we didn't know how or who to sell it to, or it was not good or professional enough, I don't know...

nradov 4y ago
You should have established personal relationships with a few local agents and then offered to do all the work yourselves for free to add that service to their listings. If it worked well that would have given you some positive references, or at least feedback on how to improve.

alin23 4y ago

If you want to get paid, projects will need a lot of non-coding work after coding the basic features: presentation website, payment/licensing, contact forms, ProductHunt/HN launch, copy text (have you ever tried to fit what your product solves in two short sentences?) One good strategy I found accidentally through Lunar (https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi) is to launch for free, prioritizing the contact form, and letting people know that you’ll want to make the product paid in the future. After all the user feedback, the product will probably look very different from the first free version and most people will want to pay for the new polished version. Some will feel betrayed, but as long as you’re keeping the old free version available, you’re not doing anything wrong. I shared Lunar for free for 4 years before doing a huge paid update with Apple Silicon support and a ton of user feedback implemented. Most people were happy to pay and I’m now doing Lunar full time, earning around $3.5k a month, and the best part is that Lunar v1 only needed about one week of work to see that it solves a real problem. Even Kitze himself liked it: https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/1464203795030761477 https://twitter.com/thekitze/status/1464203795030761477

cercatrova 4y ago
Lunar is a great app! I've been using it along with Vivid.
- alin23 4y ago
  Thanks! Not sure if you’re aware but Lunar also has XDR Brightness: https://lunar.fyi/#xdr https://lunar.fyi/#xdr In fact the feature landed in Lunar before Vivid launched and it uses a different approach that increases the brightness for the whole system instead of only for what’s behind an overlay like Vivid does (although the overlay also has its own advantages like being able to only increase brightness for a single window etc. ) It can be activated in the same way as Vivid: increase brightness over 100%
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    Yep, that was why I installed Lunar as well. I was evaluating the various options, between Vivid, Lunar and BetterDummy since they all have the XDR feature.

pueblito 4y ago

I had this great idea to make a Linux distro with a ranching theme centered on containers. I had a great little basic system going with tons of fun ranching puns; I called the containers cows and so there was roundup and branding and slaughter etc. I even put ASCII barbed wire fences comments to divide sections of code. Man I felt so defeated when I found out RancherOS was a thing, but without the whimsy

tantalor 4y ago

The smallest "tiny violin playing just for you" ever

neoyagami 4y ago

Now im going to shipit

LVanguard 4y ago

I had this experience a couple of months ago when I noticed a gap in the shopify app ecosystem. I saw some comments discussing this need, found nothing in the store, and had a friend starting a shop that could potentially use it as well. Worked on the app for 2-3 months, polishing, coding, learning tailwind and a bit of formal UI design in the process. Kept thinking "It's not ready yet. Just needs this hook into the UI. Needs React. Needs a Rails backend. Needs built in email support"... As you can guess, I never shipped. Fast forward 7 months later and I found myself browsing the store again, and yep, found TWO applications in the store that solved the same issue I was attempting to solve months earlier. With installs, and reviews! Got pretty down on myself for a couple of days with the author's same sense of happiness, doubt, sadness.. I'm working on another application where the same 'hesitate to ship' tendencies started rearing their ugly heads. I've started experimenting with just setting deadlines for shipping, feature complete, etc. I'm submitting the app to Shopify today. And no, I don't consider it anywhere near 'ready'.

rukuu001 4y ago
The most affirming thing in the world is making something and then selling it. The second most affirming thing in the world is watching someone make the exact thing you thought of and then selling it.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Why is selling it affirming? I never got a huge amount of satisfaction from selling things. Giving things away always brought me more satisfaction. In fact, putting a price tag on something I was giving away always seemed like step 1 towards no longer caring about it.
sillycube 4y ago
Always focus on your advantages. When they launch earlier, of course they can enjoy early users. As a late comer in the market, you can observe what they miss and compensate their weaknesses. You save yourself time because you can study from them
hgomersall 4y ago

DethNinja 4y ago

Why not release it regardless? Many SaaS offerings have competition, you don’t have to aim for a field where competition doesn’t exist. In fact, no competition is usually red flag about the idea.

Markstar 4y ago

I'm a bit in a similar boat: My wife's department (university) asked me for a 'little' favor, which I programmed in Java to get back into programming after ~4 years of being a stay-at-home dad. After finishing the prototype in 2019, we made the life-changing decision to focus on making it a program that we want to sell. Decided to go C++ and Electron, but with the corona virus and me taking forever to learn all the skills, I still haven't released it as of now. :( However, I'm still working on it and hope to release it in time for a conference that I signed up for, so this will be a 'make or break' year for me.

jacquesm 4y ago
Make sure they don't claim copyright on your code.
- Markstar 4y ago
  Thank you for the heads up, but I don't see how. They were not part of the development and have no financial involvement. Hmm, now that I think about it, I am going to the conference as affiliate of the university... :/
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    All it would take is that they specified what to build and claimed that you never sent them an invoice but that it was work for hire regardless. Remember that they are much bigger than you and if there is money involved they may well act irrational, and as a smaller party this can be very unnerving and costly. Best to make sure that you have it spelled out that the code is yours, stick a big fat copyright sign on top of it and if possible get them on the record that it is clear that the rights belong to you. When in doubt, consult and IP lawyer.
    - Markstar 4y ago
      Again, thanks for taking the time to write! It is certainly good advice! Luckily the situation is in this specific case is that I don't have to worry about it - I'm 100% sure of it. My nightmares come more from the fear that I will finish one day and find out that I took too long and I missed my window of opportunity.

sbayeta 4y ago

This had me laughing loudly, and sadly. Really super good article, give it a read if you haven't shipped because of reasons

pcwelder 4y ago

I have an opposite story. I created a reddit bot that recommended some words to the users on https://reddit.com/r/whatstheword https://reddit.com/r/whatstheword subreddit posts. I could've done a lot of things to improve quality, but it looked good as a first draft and shipped it following that philosophy. It turned out to be buggy, and the bot ended up getting banned after an overnight run. So I think "just ship it" applies only in a large market where you can recover, and losing a few customers is expected.

s_dev 4y ago
How would you know that the bot would have been banned without shipping? What is preventing you from improving and re-releasing the bot? Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping.
- pcwelder 4y ago
  I don't want to circumvent the ban by creating a new account, it's against the rules, and mods will ban it without considering anything else. I could try convincing the mods, but it'll not be easy. > Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping I did get fast feedback and fresh views on what's lacking, and it was a good learning experience. But if I were to do it again, I'd spent 4x the time to include more functionality and do extensive testing.

Dave3of5 4y ago

> I started building an app on 01.01.2018. It was New Year's Eve and we just had the crappiest night ever. Yes, imagine a night so bad that at midnight you decide "you know what, fuck it, I'm gonna work on WEB DEVELOPMENT". That bad. Am I the only one that actually enjoys development ? I do development for fun in my free time, often with things that are completely throw away.

Tijdreiziger 4y ago
I enjoy coding when I have a problem code can solve. (Sometimes I enjoy it a little too much, and before I know it I've skipped dinner.) I don't think I'd code just for the sake of it, though.
corobo 4y ago
There are multiple types of development I LOVE tinkering with silly bots or automations I’ve come up with to solve a problem I’m having for sure! I’d happily chuck away a weekend even if it’s just preliminary work that ends up scrapped. This is fun! I don’t love everything dev I do for pay, that often comes more under the “well, the bills do need paying..” category Not because it’s bad or unethical or whatever, don’t get me wrong, it’s just going to be basically the same tasks I did for the last site. Not as fun.

camillomiller 4y ago

Or "perfect is the enemy of done"

quickthrower2 4y ago

He has a competitor, but he can still ship now … right? Sounds like he has intimate product knowledge and knows the pain points. Maybe pivot to the thing that people who buy the competing product need?

steffs 4y ago

The realness here is palpable

rglover 4y ago

> "After 2 years of development, juggling between the fucking horror that's the web platform, React Native, Expo, GraphQL, bitching about how there's no ideal tech stack, the good old jQuery and Filezilla days, switching to other projects, releasing other apps, losing passion, finding passion, coming back to the app, etc. etc. etc..." There is now. https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick https://github.com/cheatcode/joystick

jschveibinz 4y ago

“The MVP was ready in a few days. I'm not that good of a coder, it's just a simple app.” This sentence is incredibly important. If a MVP is ready in 3 days, then how valuable can that product be? When literally everyone has access to tools that they believe can result in something marketable in only a few days, then we have achieved the time when nobody makes money from software. Thoughts?

deleted 4y ago
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Multiplayer 4y ago
The MVP is just the beginning of the journey. A toe-hold in a market space you are about to explore. The MVP gives you your first data set to work with. I know very few people willing to commit to the long journey of making something. Even fewer that will bother marketing it. There is lots of money in this banana stand!
KennyBlanken 4y ago
> If a MVP is ready in 3 days, then how valuable can that product be? How long do you think it took to come up with a prototype for Tinder? A bunch of photos, a blurb of text, geolocation/distance calculation, you like or dislike a profile, and a messaging function. The slight, simple spin on grindr - showing a stack you HAD to make your way through - instead of grindr's grid - launched them into the stratosphere.
- jschveibinz 4y ago
  I agree. But the use of the phrase MVP in place of the phrase “initial prototype” is what I am probing. I think that the misuse of “MVP” distorts the understanding of the long and difficult process of developing and marketing a “viable” software product.
lostcolony 4y ago
If you stop at the MVP, agreed. The implication is either what you have in an MVP is good enough no one will compete, or that you'll keep moving forward with it once you get any sort of validation.

esjeon 4y ago

This is just a personal viewpoint, but I think the era of "just ship it" will be gone after a decade or so. * Software "development" skill will become so common and cheap that simple tools won't get any market. * The market will be dictated by tools instead of code content. * Language-as-a-service will be a thing, as it allows customers to fill in business requirements AND allows the backing company to perform engineering behind the scene.

deleted 4y ago
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loh 4y ago
I wholeheartedly agree, and I may even be working on what you're describing here, which I wrote a little bit about on my company blog (bit of a shameless plug, sorry): https://blog.molecule.dev/system-integration-tool-not-framework https://blog.molecule.dev/system-integration-tool-not-framew...

dcow 4y ago

While there’s clearly some nugget of advice in this rant, I can’t help but find it really cringe to the point of wondering if the author has mental or psychological issues. They are literally sitting here telling everyone else to ship their shit but they won’t ship their shit. Talk about bad ways to lead. Does the author want a pity party? I’m just really confused what I’m supposed to take away as the reader from all the self flagellation. Is it an effective literary tactic for people?

openplatypus 4y ago

I got stuck on weird integration with the payment processor. This, plus a few other minor issues set me back two months. No biggy, right? Wrong. I have shipped B2B product in late November. Came in December downtime. Close to 4-5 months wasted because I delayed shipping. Till day I slap myself in the face for that.

loh 4y ago
This kind of thing happens way too often and is one of the problems my startup (Molecule.dev) solves. May I ask which payment processor?

sillycube 4y ago

It doesn't matter at all. When you see the landing page of the product and some existing customers, it means that the market is valdiated. You can still release your product and catch up. With a competitor working in the market, it's just like a north star. You can execute as fast as possible to get some customers. I think the op is intrigued by his ego. The existing product is a good inspiration to valdiate his assumption

jonnypotty 4y ago

Shit man. That sucks.

donatj 4y ago

I have been working on a side project for going on 12 years now. In that time a bunch of competitors popped up. I gave up on the idea several times. All the competitors shut down their public APIs though, which is why I started up on it again about 5 years ago. I've got it in a place I really like. I use it daily. The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all the data encrypted in a way I can't read it. I haven't worked out the scheme. I've got it in a sort of private beta, but I can't get anyone to use it other than me. And you know what, I think I'm at peace with that. The project has been if nothing else a place for me to test ideas and try techniques. Beyond that, it's the tool I wanted. The Digital Ocean droplet I run it on costs me all of $5 a month, the domain $15 a year. I could be doing worse.

lloydatkinson 4y ago
What is it?
hansonw 4y ago
plug in https://www.etebase.com/ https://www.etebase.com/ and ship it :D
- donatj 4y ago
  Huh, interesting. That's actually not a horrible idea.

tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago

I started working on the project (one that I'm currently working on) around the beginning of 2021. I stopped though after a month because the alpha version I made looked terrible (and got some mean reviews on places) and I thought maybe the product just doesn't fit in anywhere. I got contacted by a few VCs, upon realizing my crappy project had some potential, I started working on it again, regularly started contacting the potential users, launched 3 private versions until July 2021. The bunch of users I had liked it but then... I stopped updating it and it eventually sorta died. I just couldn't get out of the private beta in time. Stopped working on it for ~8 months. Recently got in a startup pipeline program of a large accelerator for this project which made me realize how stupid I am to keep throwing cool opportunities that come my way. So, now I'm back at it hoping to get out of that grim cycle of not shipping on time. I've got the 2.0 version of my project in works shipping later this month. And, luckily enough, all those old private users (and new developers I started contacting again) really do want to get their hands on the 2.0 version. Hopefully, this ends well for a "shipping story".

texasviking 4y ago

Hits me in the feels. In 2011 I had an idea for a ceramic coffee mug with a threaded base. then build a screw on base with heating element, battery, and QI charger. Screw the base on, set it on a QI charge pad... voila "always hot coffee". When you're done for the day, unscrew the base, put the mug in the dishwasher. Rinse, repeat. For a year I researched getting a prototype built, castings, etc. Finally decided to just abandon it. Just drink coffee faster and it won't get cold. Now I have 2 Ember mugs and an Ember travel thermos. Still can't dishwash it, but dang it's useful.

HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
Why does it need to screw into the heater? I picked up a coffee mug heating plate at a garage sale for $3. Works great.

rawfan 4y ago

I built a really shitty version of linkedin for people in my school to stay in touch after graduation (in 1998 i think). People were really using it and pressing me to improve on it. I just didn't care and at some time just deleted it (angering many friends). No regrets, though. I was definitely not ready to take the idea any further, back then.

brundolf 4y ago

I'm waffling on when to "ship" the programming language I've been working on for the past couple years. I think it could be something real and useful, but there are still things I want to add/redesign/fix before I officially thrust it out into the world as an alpha version. But I'm worried about killing the initial spark of enthusiasm when people try to use it and it's still broken. Or when they start building on it and then I redesign some language feature and their code doesn't work in newer versions. I wonder if it's a different question for something like a language, or whether I'm just getting sucked into the classic fallacy

danenania 4y ago
Shipping isn't a binary and it isn't something you can only do once. If the project is still very rough, "shipping" may just mean emailing it to 20 people you think might be interested. Getting reactions from real people is the key thing, not publicizing it far and wide--in many cases it is smart to wait on that until you've gone through a bunch of iterations with a small number of early users. For example, you could post a link to your language right here. Not that many people will see it, but some of the ones that do may give you useful feedback and start keeping tabs on the project. There isn't much downside.

goatcode 4y ago

Having experienced this very thing, I can say: there's a good chance the other guys had already made their app in some form long before this guy did. Don't worry, bro: everyone has had a cool idea (all of which are very cheap -- ideas, that is) and then seen someone else doing it later. The good news is this though: if you're dishonest and connected enough, you can still make your app succeed. Especially if it's worse than your competitors'. I have a strong suspicion that that's how it's usually done.

bogwog 4y ago
> if you're dishonest and connected enough, you can still make your app succeed. Especially if it's worse than your competitors'. Wtf is that supposed to mean?
- goatcode 4y ago
  That nepotism and sociopathy rule the tech business world the same way they rule most any other business world.

czhu12 4y ago

The tone of this post suggests that if the author simply just shipped, they would be as successful as the competitor. Building successful products is not a matter of “shipping” but also promoting, selling, continually improving, studying user behaviors, providing customer support and engaging potential customers. Given that the author wasn’t even motivated enough to ship when all these other tasks weren’t even applicable yet, I can’t imagine they would be motivated to do all the work after shipping. Frankly, this is a good thing. I’ve never been more stressed than when I’ve managed to ship a product, picked up a tiny number of paying customers, and subsequently realized that many hundreds of more hours would have to be poured into the product to make it truly useful. You slowly start working on it, customers are upset and start churning, and you’re constantly questioning whether it’s worth it anymore to keep pushing. The most success I’ve ever had was building something I personally thought is fun and interesting with 0 expectations of money or profit, customers be damned. I’m building https://mintables.club https://mintables.club right now, sometimes I pick it up for a few hours on a weekend, often I ignore it for weeks, but I visit it all the time because I love the artwork people upload. There’s tons of competitors that do similar things, even before I started it, but I couldn’t care less.

vagab0nd 4y ago
Came here to say this. One more thing to add: it's very likely that there are more competitors out there than the author realizes, and even more failed attempts at the same problem that the author never sees. I've made the mistake of (falsely) convincing myself that what I was building was unique, probably because I wanted it to be true. It was rather stupid, but it's a mistake I will never make again.

megablast 4y ago

Built it in 2 days, then it took 2 years to rebuild.

rubenhak 4y ago

It might be a good opportunity to talk to them and join the team.

ZephyrOhm 4y ago

Great story. Wonderful humor. Candid honesty. Appreciated

simonblack 4y ago

What is sad when you have an idea. You just know it will work, but you can't afford to develop it yourself. And you tell yourself that there's no way that anybody else will think of your idea and, worse, patent it! This was one of mine. I invented it in 1978, when I built a house with a pool in the central atrium. You want that swimming pool to be both indoors and outdoors at the same time. Note the year that "they" invented it. https://vergola.com/ https://vergola.com/ Pardon me while I just slink off and cry.