The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
1–10 of 316 posts
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#2It sucks to realize that someone else beat you to a proper release. Happened in my last job, we went though the stages of grief just as the author here.
In the end you learned a lot about new technology, about your pace of development, about you thinking, about aspects you like and don't like. The lessons learned "ship it" prepares for next time.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#3On the other hand, there is no second try, to make a first impression. And the first impression lasts a while. So at least get some feedback before "just shipping". Otherwise reactions might be "doesn't work" - because what was obviously a start button for you making it, was not so obvious for someone just stumbling over it.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#4I wholeheartedly agree with this, when I started working on Kviklet we were a team of 3 and one of us was a lot more perfectionist than the others. It took a lot of convincing to even put our (tbf shitty) first website version up. Much more to release our repo.
We lost that "co-founder" early on, but man I'm glad we released early and tried to sell.
It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were working on a product without knowing if anyone would ever want to pay for it, keeping our hopes up in the dark.
By now we went with the backup plan and open sourced and have a few cool users. Could maybe even say it's a small community: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet
It's not the startup success story that I hoped for a year ago. But it's a lot better than still hoping for it and not being a bit more grounded. Also open-source doesn't mean I can never sell support or a premium version and still make a few bucks right? For now it's just a fun side project though.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#5I started mine in 2017, after I left the start up i co-founded. 2 months later, the app was. I still haven't posted a show hn.
In fact, after 2 years, someone approached me saying he is building the exact same product, but in Germany. We had several zoom calls. He shipped it, failed and iterated. I'm just watching him and hoping someday I get some time to actually do something with mine.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#6> so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem
I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% was "having the idea". I thanked him and told him that he has a head-start of 6 months, if his app hasn't hit the market by then, I'd write the thing myself.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#7Depends on your target audience.
I have a side project that's just an internal tool for my music visualizer/ lyric video generator.
It has no functional sign up for new users and is very difficult to use. It's "shipped" as in I use it for my projects.
Another is a simple web app a friend requested. He uses it occasionally. I'm sure y'all on HN could probably find half a dozen issues with it. But it's what my friend wanted and I learned a lot.
The moral of the story is use Flutter from the start, don't worry about shipping apps( do you really want to struggle with the various app stores for what's just a web app anyway), and ship early and often.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#8Why not ship now? Well not now in 2024, but when this article was written?
Most apps and services you use were not first to market.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#9I wholeheartedly agree with this, when I started working on Kviklet we were a team of 3 and one of us was a lot more perfectionist than the others. It took a lot of convincing to even put our (tbf shitty) first website version up. Much more to release our repo. We lost that "co-founder" early on, but man I'm glad we released early and tried to sell. It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were work…
> Pull Request-like Review/Approval flow for database queries
Terrible description IMO. a query should not need approval. Should use mutation or edit or update or modification. Even if query is technically correct it just sounds wrong and confusing.
Re: The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)
#10> Even though they were working on it for the past few years it's still slow, buggy, and super unpolished, it doesn't matter, because they shipped.
> Their mobile app is terrible and it needs 10 seconds to sync. It doesn't matter, they shipped. And I'm looking forward to every single update they release.
> Their backlog of things to do is huge, but it doesn't matter, they ship every single week, and the app is growing along with the community.
Sigh. I agree, and I can empathize, but as a user I am so sick and tired of half-finished crap being shoved out the door just to beat the competition to the starting line. Every day the software we use becomes slower, more bloated, and less stable, and part of it is exactly this attitude of throwing crap at the wall and hoping it sticks. And the sad part is, since everyone is doing it, you can't really not do it, otherwise--as the author discovered--you get left in the dust.