The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

> My point isn't really about the customer - it's about the startup,

Startups are about the customer. Every single thing we do, whether related to tech or not, is to find and satisfy a customer's need in order to make it worth their while to give us money for our product. I think we agree on that, but if you ever disconnect your perspective or decisions from the customer, you open yourself up to going off-track.

And before that one of the founders of BitGo was at Google and and wrote much of the HTTP/2 and SPDY :)

This is extremely true.

I think some people are "maximizers" - They will always do research to seek out the "best" for their given budget for even moderately priced purchases. Engineers tend to fit this profile, so its easy for them to get psyched-out when trying to ship a product.

But people - and businesses - aren't always like this. They will buy what's available and seems to get the job done and seems like less of a hassle.

I worked at a company that at one point had an inferior product to our biggest competitor. We survived and they went out of business. Looking back, one big reason was the fact that we were able to fly under their radar until we had feature parity. We had no fear of shipping early... or shipping half-baked features. I kind of cringe now looking back. And when we finally eclipsed them (as those half-baked features slowly became fully-baked) we were still invisible to them - it wasn't until we started poaching some large accounts of theirs that we finally landed on their radar.

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!

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...