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The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

kitze.io

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Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#71

Post by alin23 »

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) 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

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#72

Post by executive »

konschubert wrote: post #57
executive wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[1] looks like a hastily prepared landing page for a dropshipped AliExpress product. 1 photo, no video. Why only Google Calendar? How to 'use your phone to connect'? Is there a companion app? Why is contact page under Policies and labelled Imprint? Why 2 Privacy Policy links? About us section reads like boilerplate scam and links off-site to some random blog. Line height config looks ugly in bottom nav area. At least…

Hi, thank you for having a go over it! This is great feedback. I find it really, really hard to take good pictures and even harder to take video. I am getting help with that and I hope the situation will improve. yes, there is a companion app, should I make that more clear? The contact page is labelled imprint because that's the law here in Germany... I could have an additional contact page though. The two privacy po…

Looking better already!

On clickthru Shopify page, there are some decent photos. But would replace/remove the Amazon text in one of them.

Also would show the back / cord & connector.

Yes, would have apps page with direct links to store.

Re: contact page. Is this actually true? This page for example still says contact when viewing Germany version of page. https://teenage.engineering/contact

Re: privacy: you could have one link, with some way to show both once you get to that page. Few will read this anyway, may as well not clutter home page with 2 links.

Good luck my friend.

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#73

Post by pueblito »

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

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#74

Post by nradov »

seiferteric wrote: post #70

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…

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.

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#75

Post by dqpb »

SamBam wrote: post #37
rob74 wrote: post #31

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?

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.

Until he adds some actual facts, I’m going to assume the story is not true.

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#77

Post by krallja »

martindbp wrote: post #5

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 t…

> 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.»

Re: The saddest “just ship it” story (2020)

#80

Post by LVanguard »

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'.

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