

How to hustle and launch in 3 weeks: The FOBO Backstory - guiseppecalzone
http://josephwalla.com/how-to-hustle-and-launch-in-3-weeks-the-fobo-backstory

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martinjones
You've got to admire this. Everything in that post makes complete sense and is
stuff I've read time and time again. For some reason, though, I keep falling
into the trap of trying to perfect everything I make before I let anyone else
see it.

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ed
The features you build _should_ be perfect. The trick is to build fewer
features, not ship low-quality stuff :)

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neil_s
Just curious, what were the initial assumptions proven wrong by their 3 week
old MVP? Would be awesome if the founders jumped in, there's not much
backstory on the blog.

~~~
ed
Oh, so much. We've completely rebuilt how we do starting prices, we've tried
flash sales (everything would queue up until a certain time of day), we didn't
think we needed Paypal support, we didn't have granular notification settings
so you couldn't initially "follow" a specific product, guaranteed offers have
been completely reimplemented 2 or 3 times, etc.

The bottom line, something we really learned from Yardsale, is no matter what
you build, the perfect product, you'll end up discovering you built the wrong
thing. The longer you spend on your beta, the more costly deep iterations
become -- design assets, polish, etc. all are very expensive.

We started out with I think a 2 wk spec, which actually took 3 wks to build,
and followed up by restricting every new feature to a 2 day spec, including
big things like user-to-user payments. This changes how you think about these
features. Suddenly you realize you don't need ACH integration, you can mail
checks until you hit some scale where an intern can't handle it any more, etc.

PS - Shout out to Scribd, and the Parse founders, who've made an art of this
kind of development.

