

Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? - Jarred

I've been working On an idea since October, mostly alone but its been a slow yet quick-to-change process, but I feel that it's about time I get something out there. I'm really just wondering, how do people get these startups up in running in such a short time like a month or even two months?<p>I'm not sure if what I'm creating is more complex than most (it probably is) or if its that I'm essentially doing this alone with the exception of occasional questions that I ask one of my smarter friends about.<p>It could also be my work ethic, as during the week I have a maximum of 3-4 hours to work on it and eat dinner, and exercise for about an hour and a half and then shower &#38; sleep<p>Most of my time is spent refining the idea, and the times when I got something working I quickly realized a much better way to approach it, and that has happened a few times. Should I just do it and slowly improve or continue this agonizingly slow process of refine, create and redo?<p>Or rather, how do I leverage the time I have to create a useful utility quickly?
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jasonkester
The key is to have built lots of stuff already.

Once you've launched a dozen sites (possibly for consulting clients or even
old employers if you were careful with your contracts), you'll have a good set
of tools built and lots of pieces that you can use to cobble together a new
site in a hurry.

As an example, S3stat went from idea to launch in a weekend because the only
thing I needed to build to make it work was the actual functionality of the
product. The public site, its login system, user accounts, forums, CMS, admin
backend, continuous build/deploy, and all the data access boilerplate were all
torn out from other projects that I'd built over the years.

If I had to build all that stuff from scratch, it might have taken a couple
months to have a good product site ready to compliment the comparatively tiny
piece of code that is the actual functionality that people pay for.

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riskish
Cool. Do you mind sharing how much s3stat pulls in?

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jasonkester
It took it a couple years to get to the point where it could pay my rent.
Today, I could probably live off of what it brings in, but thankfully I don't
have to.

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riskish
Cool. I like the idea, I wonder if there are other services that could use
better display and benefit from a similar service. Are you working on versions
for other platforms besides S3?

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niktrix
make website , use social networking , patch with any ad agency . Start with
lots of ads to your targeted user.

Start small contest which relates to use of your product.

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Jarred
I wasn't referring to marketing... I literally meant out, as in released.

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niktrix
you need to do marketing only before release so that you can get good
userbase.

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instakill
Paid marketing, before a release? For a startup project? What crack are you
smoking?

