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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)

#91

Post by rukuu001 »

LVanguard wrote: post #80

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…

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.

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

#92

Post by pcwelder »

I have an opposite story.

I created a reddit bot that recommended some words to the users on 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.

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

#93

Post by gamerDude »

onion2k wrote: post #25

"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.…

In fact, you don't even have to have a product to start selling. All my successful products and companies started by selling first and building something only once I already had someone who wanted it. Those turned into companies generating $100k/mon.

The ones where I just went and built something and started selling the MVP are making a couple $100/mon.

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

#94

Post by konschubert »

executive wrote: post #72
konschubert wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you

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

#95

Post by altdataseller »

wildmanx wrote: post #89
onion2k wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. But don't you run the risk of some potential customer coming, trying it, deciding it's crap, moving on, and now they are burned for the foreseeable future? So, once your product isn't that crap anymore, they won't come bac…

This is a problem in a market where they are maybe a small # of potential customers (ie. a niche market like 'satellite imagery data'), but not if your market is the Fortune 10K

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

#96

Post by [deleted] »

karterk wrote: post #22

> 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.

[deleted]

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

#97

Post by jacquesm »

Markstar wrote: post #85

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 s…

Make sure they don't claim copyright on your code.

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

#98

Post by paxys »

Chris2048 wrote: post #7
techplex wrote: post #2

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

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.

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.

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

#99

Post by cersa8 »

Reason077 wrote: post #24
slimebart wrote: post #23

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…

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!

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.

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

#100

Post by dceddia »

mwcampbell wrote: post #81
spamizbad wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

It's worse if we routinely read highly critical message boards like this one. I'm currently developing a desktop app using Electron, but comments like this [1] make me wonder if I should scrap it and start over using purely Rust and/or C++. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31350035

100%! I had the same fears when I started rewriting a native Mac video editing app in Electron last year, that it would be a big hurdle and that people would hate it. I don’t think that’s actually true anymore outside of our limited tech bubble. I also don’t think it’s necessarily true that “Electron == slow”, especially if you can offload the heavy stuff to native code and use Electron just for the UI.

I switched to using Tauri recently though, with the same sort of architecture - Svelte front end, Rust for the heavy stuff, and it’s working out nicely. It’s actually faster than the Mac app in most ways (and to be fair, Electron worked well too, but the installer size and startup time bugged me)

If you don’t like the bloat of Electron and don’t mind dealing with 2 browser engines instead of 1 (Webview2 + Safari), Tauri is worth a look. Doubly so if you already know some Rust. They’re still a bit early days in some respects, so it depends on what Electron features you need.

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