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Aaron Swartz: Perfectionism (and his new startup, Jottit)
- palish 19y agoLike Artix, Chain would have failed in its current form no matter how smooth it was polished. It was very important that we failed fast so that we could focus on morphing it into something that works. You lose that with perfectionism. So you'd better be a Steve Jobs.
- aston 19y agoSteve Jobs releases with less than perfection all the time. If you need evidence, look no further than giving AT&T an exclusive with the iPhone. The key is accepting that people prefer products to promises, and just going ahead with something that's good enough without it being perfect.
- palish 19y agoBeing a perfectionist doesn't mean you make perfect things. However, perfectionism requires perfect taste for success. It feels like there are two forms of design: "release early and release often" and "release it perfectly". Very few people have the taste necessary to find success in the latter.
- far33d 19y agoGood point - "release early, release often" is also a quest to perfectionism, but is a public quest. You have your users determine what is perfect, what directions to go in. Holding something to yourself until it is "perfect" is a solo quest. You may spend too much time on the wrong things and no time on the right things. But you also won't release something that is completely broken.
- omouse 19y ago"You may spend too much time on the wrong things and no time on the right things." Aha, now we know what to call that solo quest for perfection: premature optimization.
- omouse 19y agoDon't you dare say Chain is failing. I'm still using the site! Just make it look a tiny bit nicer, get a few mentions on various blogs and you'll be fine. A PayPal donate link may help too?
- palish 19y agoAw, thanks mouse! I love creating something that at least one person likes. We're just refocusing the site. I'll toss you an email with the outline of the redesign so you can approve or disapprove it. Edit: Email away
- oditogre 19y agoWhat is Chain?
- palish 19y agohttp://www.cha1n.com http://www.cha1n.com
- oditogre 19y agoSo it's something like a community incubator? Interesting. Not something I'd use, but interesting.
- palish 19y agoHehe, no, and that's why it's being redesigned. The focus isn't immediately clear. It's currently a productivity site. You'll say "I'm going to run every day". When you've done it you check back to the site and make a post about it and attach a photo. Your post is shared with everyone else doing the same thing as you, and you can upvote posts.
- gscott 19y ago> So you'd better be a Steve Jobs Steve Jobs is a huge perfectionist. However he will make you work 70+ hours a week to achieve his perfection and he will ride you every step of the way to get the best out of you. http://www.folklore.org http://www.folklore.org
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- steve 19y agoI think you have set a new record for deciding defeat the fastest:)
- palish 19y agoDepends what you mean by defeat. It seems like one is only defeated when they stop trying new things, which is never going to be the case for us. But one can simply fail by making something only 2 people want.
- nickb 19y agoI notice a lot of animosity towards PG in Aaron's writings...
- brlewis 19y agoAaron did know PG personally; maybe he's right. Tell you what, anybody in a YC-funded startup who, like Aaron, tires of weekly+ email exchanges with this humorless nudzh, just redirect him to me. PG can pester me about my project, and you can work undisturbed. Sound good? I'd be happy to do you that favor.
- mattmaroon 19y agoA lot of people have a strong dislike of Aaron. I've certainly had unpleasant experiences.
- morris 19y agoSuch as?
- ecuzzillo 19y agoI expect Matt will have more personal bad experiences, but the most well-publicized one goes approximately as follows: - Aaron applies to YC, starts Infogami with a co-founder who drops out (presumably because of Aaron's special interpersonal sparkles). - Aaron launches Infogami, with a promise of a new feature every day. - Aaron complains for a long time about how he doesn't have a co-founder, and then merges with Reddit. - Aaron abandons Infogami (pissing off all its users, including me), and then proceeds not to do anything at Reddit, to the chagrin of the Reddits, who just effectively gave him a bunch of their stock. Aaron nevertheless has time for nauseatingly many melodramatic blog entries. - Reddit gets bought, and Aaron gets an equal share of the spoils. - Aaron cries in the bathroom (literally), and then quits Wired, the acquiring company, by just not showing up to work. (And posts a suicidal blog entry, and proceeds to delete it.) - Aaron does an interview in which he claims to have been part of Reddit from the beginning, pissing absolutely everyone off.
- whacked_new 19y agoI have reservations about that name.
- natrius 19y agoNo, it's fine. The site's going to let you list famous people who you want to sign various body parts. It'll make for an interesting tag cloud.
- far33d 19y agoThe problem w/ perfectionism is that it's only perfect in the eyes of one person...
- twism 19y agothis statement is so true
- zach 19y agoYes, I'm coining a new term - "pefectionism." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.
- deleted 19y ago[deleted]
- marketer 19y agoThat open library project didn't last too long...
- henning 19y agodidn't you see that other post? he finished it!
- dottertrotter 19y agoPersonally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. However, recently I learned my lesson. I launched hackrtrackr with only one feature, and without and going back and rethinking what I had done. The result an insanely simple website that has taken off very well. Also by launching with only one feature and minimal code it allowed me to quickly add the features I received requests for, because I didn't have to wade through a bunch of lines.
- gscott 19y ago> Personally I used to be like this. I would never launch anything, because nothing I did was ever good enough for me. Sounds like practice coding to me, I am sure the experience you gained helped you write what you decided was worthy of releasing.
- jey 19y agohttp://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit http://www.lockergnome.com/nexus/windows/2007/02/07/jottit ?
- omouse 19y ago"There is something to this, of course. But I have a contrary proposal: users love perfectionism." Wrong. I would love to see more new features on reddit rather than waiting for them to re-write everything. The search function is still somewhat broken! There is even competition of sorts: http://redditmedia.com/ http://redditmedia.com/ That site displays thumbnails for stories...why doesn't reddit.com have an extra section or option/setting for that? So many good things could be done if not for this perfectionism bullshit. Another good story: 37signals took a long time fixing Backpack and finally released a new version. Too late, I had already switched to Simple GTD. I don't get why they didn't incrementally improve things...I bet they've lost many more users due to their slowness. Perfectionism is paralyzing.
- steve 19y agoAlmost, Success is paralyzing.
- staunch 19y ago"Once a product gets past the stage where it has glaring flaws, you start to get used to it, and gradually whatever features it happens to have become its identity." -- Hardest Lessons #2 Reddit certainly fell into that one big time. Digg has done a much better job at maintaining a fast development pace.
- champion 19y agoFunny, since Aaron had exactly the opposite strategy when he launched Infogami, blogging about launching a new feature everyday and taking a very incremental approach. I don't think that lasted very long though. Everyone is free to change their mind, of course...
- oditogre 19y agoWhat's Jottit going to be, then?
- axod 19y agoApart from a failed startup?
- ecuzzillo 19y agoWatching this get abandoned will be enormously humorous.
- euccastro 19y agoWhy? Perfectionists do that all the time.
- rms 19y agohttp://beta.jottit.com/ http://beta.jottit.com/
- nirs 19y agoLooks a lot like infogami, just more broken :-)
- joshwa 19y agoor like backpack, but with the default permissions reversed (he even stole some copy from backpack)
- omouse 19y agoYeah, I don't get why he would want to try with this again. Why doesn't he focus on web.py and promoting it? That would be much more fulfilling than creating a wiki/note-jotting site.
- steve 19y agoOhh but how your perception will change when you see his site achieve a state of perfection:) Hah, anyway I myself do enjoy webpy and wouldn't mind giving something back to it, but if I were him I'd probably rather do a startup.
- bootload 19y ago"... Why doesn't he focus on web.py and promoting it? ..." The focus is there. I've been lurking the web.py mail list for a long time (Jan 19, 2006 ~ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/bootload/88347878/ ) and there has been a steady progression of code since then. So in my view it is being promoted, worked on and improved. "The programmers were in the corner doing what they were told. That's one reason they were so easy to outsource. If a programmer never really talks to the customer, never thinks, just solves little puzzles, well that's a perfect candidate for something to offshore." ~ Founders at Work, Ch24, Philip Greenspun, P325, Livingston, 2007. But instead of just promoting just another bit of technology, maybe it's better to do something with it. A lot of technology is commodity that can be replicated by some programmer in the corner. Build useful things with it, creating value is a lot harder to commoditise.
- gscott 19y agoA previous company I worked for split in two, one half took on an online training site project and my half built an online website development system. The half that did the training site all hated me because I code by the seat of my pants, sometimes put out work that needed a tweak or two and I wasn't there because I was just up for 24 hours writing it. They took 6 months designing and mapping out there project, they took another 6 months to build it and by the time they were done they had 3 months of money left to make it successful and thus went out of business while my side is still going strong 6 years later. I don't exactly advocate treating users like beta testers, but if you can`t find any more errors put it out, fix anything you didn't find that gets reported by the users, then move on.
- ph0rque 19y agohmm... how about a compromise: release early, release often, keep things as simple as possible, but get those details perfect.
- philh 19y agoWhat's the difference between "adding a feature" and "improving the site"? I always took them to be the same thing. In that sense, you're either adding a feature or you're stagnating. (Or, I suppose, going backwards.)
- eusman 19y agolooks like so 1999. come on this is 2007. and the name is like a hit train got over it ...g(j)ot it?
- axod 19y agoI disagree... users love seeing new features. If they don't work so well, they don't care. Most likely they'll enjoy them and feel privileged they are getting to use them before they are really ready. They'll see the potential. They'll start imagining what it'll be like once it's finished. If it's a cool, innovative feature they haven't seen before, they'll see it as proof you're a cool place to be. Even if half of it doesn't work. Get features out often. Of course make sure they don't break anything else, or reduce the users experience, but users love to see a site evolving and changing with them on board.
- vikram 19y agopeople seem to confuse adding features to additions in the interface. Most of the times users are either subconsciously frustrated by a problem or that there isn't a solution for it yet (i.e. why someone else hasn't solved it yet). perfection??? I think most software sucks so much that it doesn't do anything useful. It would be better to try and get your product to do just one thing that is useful for one person. Aiming for perfection is just an excuse for not building something useful.
- bluishgreen 19y agoIf aaron wants to indulge let him please go ahed. But this post is so insincere when it gives the bit about users loving perfectionism that it makes me dizzy. Its either insincere or is delusional.I don't want to have anything to do with either. PG wants to indulge with arc, he went ahed. But I don't remember him giving some insincere explanation. I am now a strong believer in motherfucker's theory of insincerity http://atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/E06C66BF-E7D5-48FF-9F7C-E6AD1B3F8F28.html http://atomicwang.org/motherfucker/Index/E06C66BF-E7D5-48FF-... (sorry, but that what he calls himself)
- mattmaroon 19y agoThat post about sincerity is interesting but exactly, completely wrong. He's completely reversed the entire cause effect relationship. I'll write a blog post as to why.
- henning 19y agoquick! to the INTERNET, in order to correct the misconceptions of others! it never stops being tempting.
- mattmaroon 19y agoThat's kind of a silly way to look at discourse. All discourse is basically someone trying to correct the misconceptions of others.
- patchwork 19y agoSo is there anything besides misconception? Is there One True Conception, which defeats all others in internet debate?
- mattmaroon 19y agoInternet debate gets a bad rep, but it's intrinsically no worse than any other written debate (which in and of itself is certainly the highest form of discourse man has ever invented). Sincere internet debate is perhaps 50% of what makes the medium useful (the other 50% being, of course, videos of kittens). Insincere internet debate is unfortunately 99% of the overall market and often clouds that fact. So if anything, there's your unified theory of sincerity. As for one true conception, I imagine it exists on many topics, though getting at it is rather tricky. I've certainly started to argue with people before only to find out, as I put it in writing, that I agreed with them, sometimes even for reasons they'd missed. So if the truth is so convoluted that you can never really know it, perhaps it functionally does not exist. I now feel my counter argument to the sincerity thing is overhyped though. I don't have enough time to make it live up. Please don't read, you'll only be let down.
- soundsop 19y agoI played around a little bit on beta.jottit.com. In editing mode, I like the live rendering alongside the marked up text. I haven't seen that before.
- kashif 19y agoWow this discussion has invoked a lot of participation, unfortunately this is useless discussion. Don't you guys have to hack?
- andyn 19y agoWhat ... and miss the two minute hate?