5 ms·

>When you spend weeks or months perfecting your product in the name of 'user experience' or 'design' before selling it, you are doing more harm than good for yo

• williamcotton 13y ago
  What if it turns out that most people are building the wrong products?
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    Sometimes the wrong product is a low quality product that does X and the right product might be a high quality product that does X.
    • jot 13y ago
      Today there is a great market for aluminium and glass mobile phones. I wouldn't recommend going into that market if you have limited financial resources. If the first, second or third developer of mobile phones made them out of aluminium and glass rather than plastic do you think they would have been more successful? How about if they gave them away for nothing, or with a total return less than cost price? If you want quality to be your differentiator, you need to already have easy access to a proven market for your core product.
      • jiggy2011 13y ago
        This applies if you are building a product which is so groundbreakingly new that nobody has any expectations for quality level yet. These products are very rare compared to those which are an evolution of an existing concept. Even with other differentiating factors you are going to struggle to sell a product which has a perception of being below par in terms of quality.
        • jot 13y ago
          It's your perception of them that they are evolutions of an existing concept. If you speak to customers it's surprising how groundbreaking they feel very simple things are. Competing on quality isn't yet as important on the web as many people in our industry seem to think. Just look at all the crapy project management, time tracking and build your own website tools out there. Many of the ones you think look bad and are poorly built have customers that love them and profitable businesses built on them them. I want quality to be a more important factor in web products but the only way that's going to happen is for more brilliant web developers to be running them. Once they have profitable businesses they can switch to putting quality first.
          • jiggy2011 13y ago
            The bar for time tracking/project management and website construction applications is very high. Many are launched but most fall into obscurity. Why would I want to buy a rushed out the door project management app when I can use basecamp? Web products is not really a homogeneous category either and spans everything from social networks to specialized applications for industry.
            • jot 13y ago
              You and I might choose Basecamp but it's amazing how many people refuse to use it for silly reasons like "It doesn't have gant charts". Many of the competitors that have launched and have fallen into obscurity from your point of view are actually generating healthy profits from a few thousand customers in an industry you don't know. There are huge opportunities for brilliant web developers to release a first product, or version of a product, in an obscure market and use the profits to build something amazing with wider appeal.
• jt2190 13y ago
  The opposite perfect is imperfect, not "looks like shit and confuses people". I daresay that even "quality" products are imperfect.
• jot 13y ago
  People who are serious about delivering quality are brilliant. I want people like you to have a proper chance at doing what you do sustainably. That way the world will have less bad products built by people who are only good at sales and marketing. Quality is very important and very hard, but it is not 2/3 of a web application. At best quality is 1/3 of a web application, with 1/3 core functionality and the final 1/3 sales and marketing. When your product is not profitable you need to let your customers decide if it looks shit and confuses them. You'll know it's ready when they pay for it and keep paying. I want people to stop leaving it too long before measuring that by giving people the opportunity to buy. Too often developers leave it too long and don't have the time, money and energy to invest in all the things you also need to get right.
  • jiggy2011 13y ago
    Isn't there a risk that releasing a product too early could cause a negative first impression and by the time you have gotten around to improving it, everyone has lost interest? Also quality is something which is difficult to define and pin down, and will also vary depending on the product. For example , a backup solution which blows away everything else in terms of innovation and usability but corrupts my data 1% of the time isn't going to get bought. And even if they fix the 1% corruption bug I'm going to remain skeptical for a very long time.
    • ZoF 13y ago
      Yep, The negative impact of releasing an unfinished project is almost always enough to make a developer wait until their product is finalized. Most intelligent people realize that they are most likely not the MOST intelligent person in the world; therefore releasing an incomplete product, when they unsure of a final release date, only opens them up to the risk of being copied and outdone.
    • jot 13y ago
      Yes there is a risk but it is very small, particularly for the sort of products that web developers build. This is why you should not do all singing all dancing PR launches too early, releases are different. If you do a big PR launch too early at the very least you'll close down a channel (e.g. TechCrunch readers) at worst everyone in the web startup industry will have heard about you. The most successful products have people that both love them and hate them, you can't make everyone happy and you will loose some customers to unfortunate experiences. Fortunately the if you've chosen a good market there are probably more customers than you can ever hope to find out about you.