Too many people like to endlessly weigh their options and wait for permission or someone's blessing to launch. I hear: I just need funding to launch my startup, I just need to get accepted to this startup incubator, I just need to find a co-founder, or I just need to read this book first.
Come on. Everybody knows that having a server and a bit of coding skill isn't enough to do anything. You have to sign a lease to an office in a trendy part of town and stock it full of free soda and Aeron chairs and hire an HR department before you can even think of getting your project going!
Now you have to have at least 10k twitter followers, at least 5k HN karma, posess at least one Arrington-stained blue dress, and win any number of other Silicon Valley popularity contests. It's all about "networking" nowadays.
I've been working on my project for a few weeks. I just bought a domain for it today. I'll wait till it's finished in a few more weeks before shipping it. It's only hosted at my computer at the moment. I've finished most of the functionality but the app needs data to make sense to users and I still need to collect that. So am I telling myself a lie? I should release now?
Here's something that may be helpful... when you're thinking "I can't ship yet" then make a list of what's stopping you. You should do this for a number of reasons, of course. But once you have a list, you can visit each item and ask yourself if that's really stopping you from shipping or if you're just temporizing. Some items might be nice to have but not really required. Others might have solutions that you haven't thought of yet because you haven't been thinking about it at all before you put it on a list and had to face it squarely. To sum up, for each item: 1) Is it really stopping you? and 2) Is there something to be done about it today or this week?
I guess sometimes 'release early' means that 'only work on the first public version for half a year instead of years'. I am basically working on something which is kind of competitor to MS Access. Even if I ship early I cannot ship anything 'interesting' under 15.000 lines of code.
You're turning it into a false dichotomy (of never ship vs always ship all the time). The point is more that you should be finishing stuff (including shipping), instead of starting projects and leaving them half-done forever.
I'll probably write it up later, but I've been letting people sign up for my product before I've considered it MVP'ed. I find it helps a lot, I hold myself to a higher standard (downtime is not longer acceptable, I have dozens of users) and it helps you focus on the right features -- it's not easy enough to use yet, and I need to work on that before adding more cool features.
You're not the target audience of the article. It's referring more to the people who spend all day hanging out at the trendy SF cafes and going to all the "networking events", waiting around to catch the eye of anyone who works near Sand Hill Road, instead of actually getting shit done.
I used to be one of those people, so it really stings. I remember even back then reading stuff like this and thinking it wasn't talking about me. Self-delusion can be a strange thing.
But then I buckled down, read informative technical books (i.e. NOT Godin, the OP, etc) and started producing instead of consuming. Evidenced by the fact that I read this article and am writing a reply, some days are better than others. :)
I don't think I'm self-deluding myself any longer, but who knows.
When I see a panhandler, I don't really think anything, unles they are funny in which case I might laugh. Usually I merely suppress the urge to engage entirely and think about it as little as possible. I certainly don't waste any of my time judging the person.
Apart from the barely-applicable analogy, it's a decent motivational blog for someone who is actually suffering from the particular problem of procrastination with regards to shipping a product. Not everyone who hasn't shipped has that problem, however, and to them this is just a confusing rant. Other common problems are lack of focus, lack of discipline, lack of ability, lack of organization, and lack of knowledge. Being told to "stop panhandling your ideas" doesn't help at all in those cases.
Some people don't have the skills or expertise required for the success of 'build it yourself'. They must pitch their idea to others in an effort to partner with one or more individuals with the skills to make it a success, or pitch it to people with the capital necessary (if the founder doesn't have the money to fund it themselves) to hire those with the skills.
If you have the right project and pitch, with determination you can attract developers to work for equity (initially) AND successfully find the capital investment (as needed).
I'd say if they lack the skills to build it, they should be developing those skills instead of trying to attract developers. When you start thinking like a hacker, you'll know how to attract them.
Then again, I'm kind of a control freak who refuses to depend on anyone. Help is nice but I'd rather make inroads myself rather than wait.
I've had trouble with this balance in more traditional mentor/ boss relationships. Getting buy in at various stages of a project is definitely a skill.
Stop thrashing about and ship.