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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)

#161

Post by beambot »

ambicapter wrote: post #142
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #68

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 a…

> The money award helped pay for my entire grad school tuition. Is that what the award was...intended for? You maybe don't want to brag about that on the internet.

I assume the award was to pay for development. As long as it wasn't grossly in excess of prevailing dev wages, why shouldn't they be able to use their salary as they see fit...?

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

#162

Post by konschubert »

Multiplayer wrote: post #126
konschubert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, how do you know whether it's your product or your marketing that sucks? For example, I tried twitter ads for my product [1] and I got zero sales after spending $50. What are good marketing strategies for niche hardware products? [1] https://www.invisible-computers.com/

I’ll buy one. Agree with the comments that you need to put a little time in to describe this thing in a lot more detail! That said, I would love to have my calendar always just sitting there on my desk. This is the perfect item for anyone with adhd or similar. I would target that niche.

I’ve heard that before from another customer, that it’s a good product for ADHD.

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

#163

Post by konschubert »

happimess wrote: post #151
konschubert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, how do you know whether it's your product or your marketing that sucks? For example, I tried twitter ads for my product [1] and I got zero sales after spending $50. What are good marketing strategies for niche hardware products? [1] https://www.invisible-computers.com/

Rad product! Can I feed it arbitrary images/html/something?

Yes, arbitrary images, you just have to specify the image url.

Here are the instructions, so you can see how it works: https://www.invisible-computers.com/invisible-calendar/image...

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

#164

Post by pcwelder »

s_dev wrote: post #111
pcwelder wrote: post #92

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 wh…

How would you know that the bot would have been banned without shipping? What is preventing you from improving and re-releasing the bot? Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping.

I don't want to circumvent the ban by creating a new account, it's against the rules, and mods will ban it without considering anything else. I could try convincing the mods, but it'll not be easy.

> Sounds like you got the fast feedback you needed from shipping

I did get fast feedback and fresh views on what's lacking, and it was a good learning experience. But if I were to do it again, I'd spent 4x the time to include more functionality and do extensive testing.

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

#165

Post by willcipriano »

openknot wrote: post #130
konschubert wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, how do you know whether it's your product or your marketing that sucks? For example, I tried twitter ads for my product [1] and I got zero sales after spending $50. What are good marketing strategies for niche hardware products? [1] https://www.invisible-computers.com/

Twitter ads are widely seen as ineffective versus other advertising channels (to verify for yourself, you can check r/PPC, r/marketing, and other subreddits via a site:reddit.com Google search). Results are likely lower due to poorer analytics, which translates to your ads not appearing to the most relevant people. Google Search Ads and Facebook/Instagram ads are seen as more effective in comparison (results are like…

Let's say you are a guy in a basement spending your own money. What is the minimum spend that you see for advertising to be at all effective?

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

#166

Post by judge2020 »

spamizbad wrote: post #66
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.…

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…

> They will buy what's available and seems to get the job done and seems like less of a hassle.

Enter AWS and GCP. People wonder why businesses seem to burn 10s of millions of dollars by choosing AWS instead of self-hosting, but the personnel and time advantage of offloading to AWS is often worth it.

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

#167

Post by tr1ll10nb1ll »

I started working on the project (one that I'm currently working on) around the beginning of 2021. I stopped though after a month because the alpha version I made looked terrible (and got some mean reviews on places) and I thought maybe the product just doesn't fit in anywhere.

I got contacted by a few VCs, upon realizing my crappy project had some potential, I started working on it again, regularly started contacting the potential users, launched 3 private versions until July 2021. The bunch of users I had liked it but then... I stopped updating it and it eventually sorta died. I just couldn't get out of the private beta in time.

Stopped working on it for ~8 months. Recently got in a startup pipeline program of a large accelerator for this project which made me realize how stupid I am to keep throwing cool opportunities that come my way.

So, now I'm back at it hoping to get out of that grim cycle of not shipping on time. I've got the 2.0 version of my project in works shipping later this month.

And, luckily enough, all those old private users (and new developers I started contacting again) really do want to get their hands on the 2.0 version.

Hopefully, this ends well for a "shipping story".

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

#168

Post by Perseids »

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

I find it really fascinating how a completely different subset of Hackernews users answers to you than are present on other threads. As literary no sibling is voicing a dissenting opinion I feel compelled to present it:

Purely from the user perspective I hate electron, because of its RAM usage. The speed argument is a straw man: Of course V8 is fast. And yes, VSCode is a very good IDE. But the problem is real world electron application don't scale down. In my (of course biased) experience even simple electron applications use at least half a gigabyte of RAM, often a whole gigabyte. If you're on a beefy 32gb machine you'll never noticed the difference. But on the 8gb machines most people around me use, these electron apps really take up a huge fraction of RAM. And swapping is definitely noticeable slow, even on SSDs. The "think about the planet" argument comes to play, when I need to upgrade my PC because RAM is the bottleneck. And seriously what fraction of the population even has the knowledge to only upgrade the RAM and not buy a whole new PC.

If I had to advise you personally, I might even tell you to choose electron. But be aware that you are using the "defect" option in the prisoner's dilemma: as everybody around you is choosing the societally harmful option of wasting resources you are at a competitive disadvantage to do the right thing. And also: electron has stolen mind share off of better solutions, so the documentation there is also not in the best place.

And even worse, those people I reach with my argument, and thus put at a competitive disadvantage because they are going the extra mile to do the rights thing, might be those that I want to support the most, because they might be willing to the right (IMO) things at other topics I value as well, like the importance of privacy.

So what is the conclusion? I have no idea how to fix our collective resource waste and it is hard to assign individual responsibility and I'm deeply dissatisfied by the whole situation.

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

#169

Post by lloydatkinson »

donatj wrote: post #158

I have been working on a side project for going on 12 years now. In that time a bunch of competitors popped up. I gave up on the idea several times. All the competitors shut down their public APIs though, which is why I started up on it again about 5 years ago. I've got it in a place I really like. I use it daily. The biggest blocker for me right now to making it open is wanting improved security. I ideally want all…

What is it?

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

#170

Post by johnhenry »

bitexploder wrote: post #64
johnhenry wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't feel bad. Even if you had continued with the idea, it may not have worked. In 2013 there was a company called "Twist" that invited users to share their location temporarily so that co-workers could know if they would be on time to meetings. At some point they shuttered most of their employees and decided to pivot into bitcoin as "BitGo". (Note that https://twist.com/ is an entirely different company now). I joi…

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

Is that you Mike?
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