

Ask HN: We need to launch but our service works 1/4 of the time, what do we do? - flounderfounder

A few friends and myself started building a virtual reality application for the medical industry a few years ago to help with surgery planning and practice for residents. All of us have been putting in time on the side of our day jobs and can’t be full time until we get revenue or investment.<p>We shopped it around when it was still just a pretotype and our target market loved it and wanted it immediately.<p>Fast forward to this weekend and we were planning on sending the big launch announcement out on Tuesday to the folks who expressed interest (~100). Unfortunately it has been issue after issue with the UI&#x2F;UX, rendering not loading consistently and navigation throwing problems.<p>We have some serious investors that we have been negotiating term sheets with and they all seem ready to sign as soon as we launch but not before. We even have a meeting this week to talk through our term sheet with an Angel group’s board.<p>I know the &quot;just ship it&quot; mantra and all that but I feel like if we do, we will kill our customer base out of frustration with the product and they will just abandon it. It feels like time is running out and either investors are going to walk or someone is going to scoop the product and market if we don&#x27;t release soon.<p>Do we push a broken product to our (~100) interested users or do we wait till it is consistently working and then launch?
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avalaunch
Does 100 users represent a small or a large portion of the total addressable
market? If it's small, just ship it. If it's a large portion of your
addressable market, then choose 5-10 of them and give them early access.

Either way, be up front about all the known issues and your plan to solve them
over time. Keep in close contact with your users and gauge their reactions. If
the pain point that you're addressing is large enough, there's a good chance
that a product that works 25% of the time is better than no product at all.
If, on the other hand, you learn that the product is too frustrating for them
to use, at worst you've only burned through a small fraction of your
addressable market. And honestly, you can probably gain a good percentage of
those back once you do perfect the product.

I also wouldn't be too worried about someone else coming along, scooping the
product and beating you to market. You've been working on it for years and you
still haven't perfected it. That suggests a certain degree of technical
aptitude is required to build the product so I doubt anyone can swoop in at
the last moment and steal your thunder. The only way for that to happen would
be if there's another team already building a product similar to yours in
which case, yes they might beat you to market. But unless there's a network
effect involved, the better product of the two will likely win out in the end
regardless.

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flounderfounder
It's actually a tiny portion of the total market but does seem to represent
some big players within it.

I think you are right with not being as concerned with the overall impact as
we are. We aren't really worried about someone scooping the idea, there are
other players in the field who could implement our same technology and we are
trying to make sure we capture a bigger market before they offer anything.

Thanks!

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sawyer1708
Launch in closed Beta. Be upfront with the customers that you accept in your
Beta program. They can be extremely forgiving with bugs as long as you inform
them before hand and especially if there is no alternative to your service.

Choose the best 10 customers for a Beta 1 - and go through a rapid phase of
issue fixing. Then increase the number of customers for Beta 2 by another 10.
Continue in this fashion till all your issues have been fixed.

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caio1982
Is it really broken for the users or broken is your definition of broken
because that's your baby and your dreams etc etc etc? If this 25% working part
represents something that users could actually use, and you are all under
pressure (for whatever reason), than ship it but ship it with a plan. E.g. let
the users know what's missing and what's your plan to ship the rest of the
service, and possibly show them a milestones timeline so they see this is not
the crappy final version of the whole thing and that you are working hard on
the other 75%. That will also help with the thing about your investors by the
way, I guess. Of course, that's only a very personal opinion. I have never
shipped a service or product like that but as a paying user/customer I would
appreciate this approach.

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flounderfounder
>Is it really broken for the users or broken is your definition of broken
because that's your baby and your dreams etc etc etc?

That is a part of it certainly but when we are doing our unit tests about 1/2
to 3/4 of the time the service doesn't do what it should and the user has to
reload all their data from scratch (takes about 15-20 minutes).

>let the users know what's missing and what's your plan to ship the rest of
the service, and possibly show them a milestones timeline so they see this is
not the crappy final version of the whole thing and that you are working hard
on the other 75%.

I like that approach - largely because all of our first customers have been
really enthusiastic and engaged in the product development. Thanks.

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tgflynn
I may be able to help you fix it.

If you're interested send me an email, my contact info is in my profile.
Please indicate what technologies you are using (ie. OS, language(s), 3D API,
any major dependencies, etc.)

It sounds like you're budget constrained, equity-only is a possibility.

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flounderfounder
Thanks I will be in touch.

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shantkiraz
Ship it and iterate. As long as there isn't a crippling series of bugs that
prevent the users from going through A > Z, then you should be fine.

MVP FTW

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benologist
Strip it down to the bare minimum you can have working in a hurry and hide the
other features till they're ready.

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flounderfounder
The thing is, we don't have any extra features because we wanted to nail down
getting our core service right. So the key process that is the primary feature
is the thing that only works about 25-50% of the time right now.

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benologist
Identify one simple reason why it fails, fix it and put in a unit test (or
something in your build process or whatever) so it doesn't happen again.

