
The saddest “Just Ship It” story - vvoyer
https://kitze.io/posts/saddest-just-ship-it-story-ever
======
PeterStuer
"just ship it" is just as dumb as "never ship it". Why are people so prone to
these oversimplified polarazations?

Also, if I learned anything over the last few decades it is that the market
supports many solutions to the same problem. Why do software developers
believe that if someone gets there first that's it it's done? Someone invented
and sells a toaster? Done. Someone started selling bikes? Better ditch my step
design. Cars? Just one brand, obviously.

People release apps into oversaturated markets every day. Most fail, some do
well, and not because they were better in every way than the competition, just
because they were different, they were tried, and some people found them to be
'Good Enough'.

~~~
noxToken
> _Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that 's
> it it's done?_

It doesn't help that when you come to HN or Reddit releasing something, the
comments are quick to point out other competing products in a seemingly snarky
way.

"I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to
yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard
to read tone in a forum post.

I don't know, man? Don't?

~~~
mcny
> "I use X. It has that feature plus these other ones. Why would I switch to
> yours?" I get the spirit of why someone would say that, but it's really hard
> to read tone in a forum post.

Maybe I'm naïve but don't see it as snark most of the time. I see those posts
as "here is some springboard for you to share the product or your vision and
goals.

Sometimes it is genuine snark but I like to believe it is usually curiosity
even if it isn't true.

I mean look at Dropbox. The basic idea is so simple. If you've used
rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product even exists.
Doubly so if you're aware of how cloud providers charge so much for network
traffic. Even Google Drive unlimited has to cap the amount of data transfer in
a day. But there are always ways. For example, I think Dropbox has now limited
free users to three syncing devices.

Or gitlab. Like huh? But GitHub exists. And surely git-web or gitea is better
suited for a web interface for git? But then gitlab has almost nothing to do
with git. As far as I understand, the goal of gitlab has always been to be a
complete product.

I bring up these two examples because maybe the comments were snark but the
founders seemed to handle it pretty well in both cases (at least publicly). I
think their self-confidence shows in the product.

~~~
CathedralBorrow
> If you've used rsync/robocopy you might think it is ridiculous this product
> even exists

I mean, only if you also have no understanding of other people having
different backgrounds, skillsets and experiences?

------
pontifier
I'm in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of
business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know
the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me
run that business profitably.

~~~
abrookewood
That's not something I expected to read! Will you migrate them to your version
of the app?

~~~
pontifier
I'm in the process of rebuilding the entire system from scratch again with the
knowledge I have.

The code I had written before would have been impossible to maintain, their
code was written in a language I hadn't used before, and our databases were
different enough that trying to merge things would have been insane.

------
blickentwapft
I just saw, after over 18 months of off and on development, that some other
company has exactly implemented my idea, minus one key feature. They did a
really great comprehensive job.

After wailing and licking my wounds for a day I decided that just because
they’ve done that doesn’t mean the game is over. I actually decided it was an
advantage because I could just copy their approach to solving certain thorny
UI challenges.

Also, it’s validation for my idea. Until I saw that I thought maybe the idea
was just a pipe dream.

It’s dumb to drop a project just cause someone else did it.

Maybe programmers tend to give up when they see someone else did it because
programmers think the code is the business or the code is the win or the code
is the success or something, when in fact success is much more than the code.

~~~
guytv
Experience taught me the opposite: If nobody have implemented your product
idea, most likely it is because there is no need for your idea. If you don't
find any competition - quit. The way you are going to be executing on an
"idea" is what counts. Seldom is the case that the first one implementing the
idea is the one that ends up taking over most of the market.

~~~
jkoudys
Being too much behind a product idea is doubly bad, because an idea isn't a
business. You need some plan for how that'll progress over time, or how does
any delivery, licensing, or potential investment get managed?

I'm about 1.5y into a startup that's picking up steam, and I've stopped
feeling worried about similar "ideas". We have a plan for who wants our
product, what they care about, and how much they'll pay for it. We have an
platform that can be used to support a plethora of unique marketable products.
We have a sales team in place. There's so much more going on than the original
"what if we used version control thinking with contracts and legal knowledge?"

------
dvirsky
Sometimes it's not just about shipping but also about knowing how to approach
it and having the vision. Case in point - many many years ago, around 2004 or
2005, I built this stupid app with a couple of friends - it was a text message
based gossip app where you can share updates on celeb spotting and subscribe
to get notifications by tags or locations. Whatever. It didn't pick up
understandably (it had like 200 users in our city), but we thought maybe we'll
pivot it:

We aggregated the reports into a website with a nice feed, and then we
thought, what if instead of one feed about celebs, people could just post
whatever they want via text messages and others could follow them and get the
texts or view the feed of these short (140 characters or so?) posts on a
website? It would be kinda cool.

But mobile providers would not allow us to send media messages, and we thought
the idea just kinda sucked and is not worth a start-up, especially since now
we have group text messaging in newer phones! And MMS support that we don't
have.

So yeah, I've basically written a proto-Twitter a bit before Twitter existed
(the gossip version also predated Gawker Stalker by a year), but the harsh
reality is that it didn't take off because of me and the people I worked on
this with weren't made of the stuff of people who start billion dollar
companies.

~~~
hoseja
That "stuff" is utter lack of scruple and astronomic amount of luck, don't
feel too bad. If there was someone like that among you, you'd probably end up
like Noah Glass anyway.

~~~
dvirsky
Maybe. One other funny anecdote about this project was that I attended this
big tech unconference around that time, and I wrote a version of this app that
allowed people to post updates from sessions, notify about upcoming sessions,
follow hashtags, etc.

So there I stood in front of 200-300 entrepreneurs and investors and internet
pioneers (there were even a couple of billionaires or people who later became
billionaires in that crowd), and I pitched it to them so they'd register and
use it.

The response was pretty lukewarm and only few people used it. And not a single
one saw anything special about the idea. Which again, is probably how I
presented it more than anything.

But anyway the moral of the story is that contrary to popular belief, being in
the right place at the right time, AND coming up with a "how come on one
thought of that before" idea before anyone else, AND actually delivering a
nice MVP - all those are not enough. Eventually it comes down to things like
tenacity and charisma and boldness and obviously luck.

------
physicles
This happened to me in 2010. I love hiking, and when you get to the top of a
mountain one of the things you do is look at all the other mountains and
figure out which ones they are. It’s called name-that-peak. Sometimes at
scenic overlooks there’s a nice hand-drawn placard with all the peaks labeled,
so I wanted to make an app to do that.

When I started, there was kind of a website to do this already, but it was
absolutely awful and I knew I could do way better.

So I did. I spent 100-150 hours working out all the math and coding up the
program to reproduce that placard from terrain data. I still have all my
notes. It was kinda slow — one panorama took 4-6 minutes to draw — but it
worked.

And then I didn’t ship. Life got in the way, and it was always harder for me
to do the second 50% than the first, even though in this case the first 50%
was way harder.

Three years later, one of my friends shared an app with me, just released. It
did the same thing. The author did a good job describing how I felt then too,
how the app was good but I hated it anyway. I never used it, probably because
I ended up moving overseas anyway to a place without free high-res terrain
data.

That was my best chance to date to do something I’ve always dreamed about:
make something cool that a lot of people love to use. Novel, good ideas like
that don’t come along very often.

------
jupp0r
> After 2 years of development, juggling between the fucking horror that's the
> web platform, React Native, Expo, GraphQL, bitching about how there's no
> ideal tech stack, the good old jQuery and Filezilla days, switching to other
> projects, releasing other apps, losing passion, finding passion, coming back
> to the app, etc. etc. etc...

> I just dropped it.

This sounds like a great project and a really good outcome. OP learned a lot
and the project provided motivation for him to explore interesting tech and
gain real insights about the drawbacks of each. If I had gotten that much of
all my side projects that would be great!

If your expectation is that each side project will turn into an Instagram
style success story, you’ll most likely never be happy.

------
stevage
One thing I find useful to remember is that every new feature is a new blog
post, a new social media post, and more opportunities to promote yourself.
Shipping with all the features is basically taking away a lot of those
opportunities. Whereas if you ship small, you can keep creating buzz about
yourself for the next two years and bring a lot of users on the journey.

~~~
semireg
I ship. But I fall flat on my face when it comes to YouTube explainer videos
and blog posts. I published 4 videos when I launched my app over a year ago
and have been coasting on those ever since. I have so much new (and
relatively) exciting content queued up. Why don’t I write and film? Because
the editing experience is EXHAUSTING. I can’t “fix a bug in a video” like I
can with a new feature. Every day, when I’ve got a few hours to work on my
project the last thing I want to do is film a screencast. Honestly, my problem
is my standards are too high (script, quality, music, flow, etc) and I’m just
not good at it.

For those interested, here’s my app’s most popular YouTube video:
[https://youtu.be/hnqUP1CZd24](https://youtu.be/hnqUP1CZd24)

My project is an electron app for printing labels. You can find more info at
[https://label.live](https://label.live)

~~~
rikroots
I know where you're coming from. I'm far more comfortable working on my
library's codebase - fixing, improving, etc - than I am with
planning/writing/creating "promotional" stuff about the stuff I've fixed and
improved in the latest release.

Promotion work is Hard Work. It's also depressing work when nobody notices the
post ... or maybe I'm just too needy.

Loved the video, btw. I'm guessing the canvas part is Fabric.js based?

My library's most popular video has 220 views. I was quite proud when it
reached 3 figures!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebxNhVWyOQ&t=31s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LebxNhVWyOQ&t=31s)

~~~
semireg
Yep, Label LIVE uses fabric. It’s all wrapped in a React app that syncs state
with redux, and app state elsewhere (e.g. user design files saved to disk).

------
julianeon
To me this sounds like the 1-in-a-thousand project that was commercially right
on the money, that was an exception to the general rule.

I've released projects, but no one gave a damn. If someone could figure out
how to monetize on parallel tracks, some idea that I had... well, cool. I
couldn't.

This ain't 2000, when you could be just name any service, google to see if it
was on the Internet, and just throw it on there to start raking in the big
bucks.

Most projects die of disinterest. So, it doesn't matter if you release, or
not: it'll die anyway.

To do better, you have to either have marketing, or a product that solves a
real market problem.

But that process isn't that easy, and if you weren't intentional from the
beginning about this, you're probably not losing much, talking your time to
learn something well.

------
brianwawok
This story implies there can only be 1 or something in the market.

This is not true at all. Almost everything has more than 1 competitor.

Ship what you have.

~~~
hnick
Yes. Nice story but I feel like the complaints about the slow UI and the rest
of it should have been fuel to go back and finish the app. Plenty of companies
have made their name doing old ideas, but better.

Though, I can definitely understand that looking at a finished app and
thinking "there's still so much to do on mine..." can be so overwhelming.

------
greggman3
I think this is an issue with software developers. They think "if I just build
it" but I look at that story and think "they weren't really serious. The other
developer _probably_ gathered a team of 5+ people and together they did all of
the things the lone software dev didn't want to do. Sales, Marketing, Docs,
Websites, sign up, customer service, etc etc etc.

I can ship a library or a demo or a small stand alone thing but it can be 10x
commitment to actually ship a real service. Deciding to actually do the other
90% of the work is a pretty big hurdle for many, me included.

~~~
kintalo
I work with people and keep pushing to ship it but all the non-engineer
members are pushing for more features. I don't think it's just a software
developer issue.

~~~
greggman3
Sorry I guess I wasn't clear.

My point was many software engineers see the product in their mind and think
"I can build that!" and think that building it is 99% of the work and if they
just built it the money will flow. But it turns out building it is only 10% of
the work and when the other 90% of the work presents itself the drive to ship
disappears.

In the OP's case the people that shipped found a way to get all the parts
needed to ship read. The person didn't ship probably just wrote some code and
never even considered the other 9 of 10 things that would need to be done to
actually ship.

I'm probably thinking of myself to some degree. I made a product. Maybe I
didn't have enough confidence to find partners or investors. I piddled with it
for about 18 months, had a few public displays, and then at a trade show I saw
someone who was serious with basically the same product but unlike me they
found investors, hired people, and had a real company. They didn't just make
some tech and a demo (what I did).

------
kevsim
Shipping is important. It's a nice feeling to get it out there. But to imagine
that if you'd just shipped it then everyone would be using your app instead of
someone else's is nonsense. You're in full control of shipping. Getting
distribution for your software - getting it to really take off - is super
super hard. Being an engineer, I think we tend to gloss over this part.

I'm working on a product in a very crowded space (issue tracking [0]).
Shipping is the easy part. The day to day grind to find distribution and drive
more and more users to your product, that's the tough bit.

0: [https://kitemaker.co](https://kitemaker.co)

~~~
drcongo
Is there a pricing page on your site? (also, does it sync issues to GitHub
issues? I'm trying to find something that does for very non-technical clients
where we don't want to give them full access to GitHub)

~~~
kevsim
At one point we did have syncing to GitHub issues (e.g. an issue created in
Kitemaker was automatically created in GitHub and vice versa, labels and
comments were kept in sync, etc.). However, we ended up dropping this feature
because it wasn't very popular with our users and it was a tough one to get
working perfectly.

I'd be curious to know if there's interest in such a feature though. We could
always resurrect some dead code ;-)

~~~
drcongo
We would _definitely_ be interested in that. We have a few very non-technical
clients who would just be a bit overwhelmed by GitHub. Add into this that
GitHub's permission levels don't allow you to have an issues only user (their
official recommended way to do this is to have an entirely separate repo, just
for your issues!), AND that we would like to set 2FA as mandatory for
organisation users, but then we're back to the non technical users for whom
the whole concept of 2FA is alien.

Thanks for the pricing info too. Sounds promising.

------
superasn
This guy is hilarious. I actually laughed reading this line: "Every time I'll
get a payment notification it's gonna feel like stepping on a lego"

Anyway FWIW it's good and not bad that you found a successful competitor doing
what you wanted to do. It is not the end of the line rather somebody else has
validated the idea for you. The only time you should actually worry is when
you can't find one single competing product to what you're building.

BTW as you put it that their app is slow buggy, there seems to be a lot of
room for improvement and so it's still not too late and maybe time to outshine
your competition and eat/share their lunch.

~~~
pacifika
They could not be around in two years For any number of reasons and have a lot
of customers looking for this unshipped product.

------
cosmodisk
A few years ago I came up with this orders portal idea at work,which nothing
special on its own,but was unique to the industry. My manager blocks it on the
basis that it isn't easy enough to use and our clients would definitely need
a,b,c features. Eventually we drop it all together. After some time, my
manager quits and I took over his position. After a few months I have a
meeting with sales,who are asking how long would it take to create an orders
portal. I explain a bit about my previous attempt in a vague manner and they
tell me that anything woul be better than nothing and should work on it. We
launch after few weeks.I tell the rest of the management about my new
ingenious solution. Clients love it. It's basic but it's zillion times better
than anything they had before. The thing is now part of the offering to large
corporates and it did help to win some nice contracts. The portal is still
buggy,a bit hard to use, have very few features and so on.

------
xZuki
If I was him I'd be shipping it immediately after seeing that. If anything
it's encouraging and you should be highly motivated to make your product
better knowing that there is competition out there that are actually
converting customers. There's very few ideas on the internet that can only
sustain one party tackling them. When this guy notices in another 2 years that
there's now 3 other people who have launched a similar service while he sat
idly by he's going to feel even more silly.

------
hugozap
To remove pressure from yourself as an indie dev look at shipping as a
starting point, not a critical event that needs to be perfect. It will be
messy, it always is, BUT there's a lot of value in real feedback and will give
you ideas you would have not had otherwise.

A quote from Kevin Ashton: "Nothing begins good, but everything good begins.
Everything can be revised, erased, or rearranged later. The courage of
creation is making bad beginnings.

------
DigitalSea
I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete
revolutionary ideas. Believe it or not, I was working on a HelloFresh type
product in 2008, before HelloFresh even existed. The exact same premise,
except my idea required no pantry staples: every ingredient in the box from
oil to sauce. People told me I was crazy, but look at services like that
now...

It is hard to get out of the mindset of just shipping something, because I was
raised and taught that first impressions matter.

~~~
meowface
>I've been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete
revolutionary ideas.

Perhaps this is typical mind fallacy, but I feel like this is 60%+ of all HN
users.

~~~
tashoecraft
It’s because the idea isn’t the part that matters, ideas are near worthless.

------
drchiu
A few years back I released an app that was almost a direct copy of another
app. It’s made enough to buy a Tesla S. Never let people say “How is your idea
different from X?” Honestly, sometimes it doesn’t have to be... much or at
all.

~~~
swyx
that cant be the whole story... did you do something different marketing wise?
its not just features, its also how you sell right?

~~~
drchiu
It was a plugin, so I relied on the plugin directory to do the marketing for
me. Other than that, it was priced competitively. Enough people matriculated
through. The app itself sucked (was new to programming), but it did made
money.

Since then, I've actually tried to do a lot of what's considered "best
practices". Ironically, none of these techniques (which many thought leaders
promote) actually worked for me. It may have worked for them (eg. prelaunch
list building, getting influencers to use their app and promote it) but as a
relative nobody, I think the rules are different for folks like me. I like to
think I need to be scrappier and to simply do things that are counter-trend.

I suspect there's a large contingent of developers making a decent side living
who aren't really talking much about things (too busy, family, other hobbies)
and what they did to get there. Sometimes it's luck, sometimes it's just doing
really dumb (but obvious in hindsight) type of things.

Over the years, I've grown skeptical about a lot of existing indie start up
dogma that's been built up over the years.

------
duxup
First app I wrote professionally I shipped 2 years ago.

Half the stuff I would have spent more time on before remain on my list and
nobody has asked for.

Meanwhile I spent time adding and adjusting completely different features.

Another related app I created (sort of a companion app)...went in another
direction that I wouldn't have predicted.

Things change dramatically in production. It seems obvious at times but how
people use an app and what they want "now" is hard to know.

------
russdill
My favorite just ship it story is the software to control the first SpaceX
droneship landing attempt. The developers told Elon that there'd be no way the
code could be ready in two weeks. He asked if they could give a 50% shot, they
said yes so they shipped the code:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E)

Of course they did learn a ton.

~~~
tsbinz
Hm, if the statements in
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvim4rsNHkQ)
are correct that failure was because they ran out of hydraulic fluid, not
software (but maybe/probably that's not the complete story)

~~~
russdill
The software likely caused an overuse of the hydraulics.

------
type0
“Just Ship It” mentality produces this kind of sad outcomes
[https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_cr...](https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_crashes)

------
Traster
I think this story is less about shipping the product and more about treating
a product as a product and treating a hobby as a hobby. If you're working on a
new project that you think should be a business, you need to atleast have an
idea going in what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve success. I
feel like you could read the next blog post in this series and it will say

>"I learned to "Just Ship it" but I thought "If I build it they will come"

And then it'll be about how putting some code out the door isn't the same
thing as launching a product.

~~~
nicbou
I find that an early release forces me to align the following updates with
what I actually need the product to do.

------
Waterluvian
The biggest reason to ship it is to start learning what you don’t know yet as
early as you can.

~~~
Gibbon1
Or you find a customer base you didn't expect. Which has happened on products
I've worked on a couple of times.

Not to mention a lot of markets look like this. Takes a year before they
notice you. A year for them to realize you aren't going away. Another year
before this buy anything. Another year before they buy in quantity.

Consider those first two years. None of those guys would know your current
product is a POS because have haven't bought any yet. And they won't really
mind finding rough edges as long as they are convinced they'll fixed.

~~~
Waterluvian
I've never shipped anything commercially on my own. But my gut feeling is that
there's a fear of, "I'm going to ship something that's not great, and so
people will look at it, decide against it, walk away, and my chance is gone
forever."

I have a feeling that in reality there is always a constant stream of new
potential customers who will consider your product, and eventually the number
of people who reject it and walk away will start to go down.

~~~
Gibbon1
My company has two customers that were unhappy enough that we refunded their
money and they came back a few years later.

------
krishan711
This happened to me a long time ago - i was making a "social" type product
that was location based and a competitor launched theirs too but their
founders were famous and they got loads of users straight away. In social,
network effects matter so launching first does have a large benefit especially
if the idea is new.

I gave up on the idea a few months later but kept an eye on the project. It
didn't take off the way it was supposed to, and I have a feeling that if I was
still working on my version I could have pivoted and taken advantage of what I
was learning by watching them faster than they could have (they had so many
users etc to support)!

And that was in social - in most other products network effects are nowhere
near as powerful e.g. I tried linear.app for a side project even though i
actually enjoy using lira at work. Since i have many projects it's easy to try
new things on some and drop / change what doesn't work.

I think the "just ship it" oversimplification comes from the fact that getting
user feedback is vital for most products. It doesn't mean that launching first
is the goal though. The product I'm working on now is in a super crowded space
(landing page creation) but it has an edge over others for a particular type
of market (developers who don't want to mess around with UI, drag and drop etc
but still want beauty and control) and even though the product is "ready" im
not "just ship it"-ing because I'm busy "talking to users".

------
pritovido
I have experienced creating products.

For me, "just ship it" is a totally wrong advice to give, in the same way as
"we will ship is when is ready"(and never is ready).

You have to plan ahead, know your limitations and say NO to adding things you
can not complete on time. And you have to plan for things that look simple
being much harder to implement in practice.

You need discipline for saying no, and it is not as funny as just trying new
things all the time(new languages, new platforms, new methodologies, new
projects). But you are an adult, not a kid, you should be able to control
yourself(and most people can't BTW, they drink coffee and smoke because they
need external controls instead of internal).

You should try new things, but not too much. It takes time for being efficient
and master something. There are diminishing returns too but productivity while
learning something new is almost zero compared with the master.

How much is too much? It depends on your specific job.

I recommend people to write down and document the actual real work that
something takes on calendars and their expectations.

Over a period of time, you will be able to compare your expectations to your
actual work in detail. You will surprise yourself where you spend most of your
time.

Then you will be able to take decisions and say NO to those areas that take
most of your time and give you back little on future projects.

------
amadeuspagel
Something that makes me a bit reluctant to "just ship it" is that you can post
things on HN and producthunt only once, so often I'm motivated until I do
that, so that my launch is more succesful, but then later I think: Only a few
users, is it even worth it to keep working on this? I wish it was possible to
keep people who upvoted/liked your product updated. Or maybe poll them on
things like: Would this feature be valuable to you?

~~~
forgotmyp77
i don't know about ph, but i don't think hn minds if you post updates every
month or two?

~~~
CraneWorm
> i don't think hn minds if you post updates every month or two?

but it's also likely not to care

------
nevster
Then there are ideas you just don't get around to...
[http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/](http://www.procrastinationjournal.com/)

------
cube00
Being first to market is overrated, once the market is established you have
much better information on how you can carve out your slice, whether that be
on pricing or some other point of difference.

Even the established players in a field get complacent or too large to move
quickly to address an emerging need and leave themselves open to disruption.

~~~
abrookewood
It might be overrated, but clearly it STILL MATTERS. I mean the entire article
is about a developer who stopped working on an idea because he was beaten to
market.

~~~
aledalgrande
That is more about him and how he reacted than how it actually works in the
market. If you have a better vision and a better execution, you can worry less
about being the first, especially in an industry with a low barrier of entry.

------
aphroz
You did not lose time, you learned. You could have built and shipped, it still
would have needed a lot of effort (and luck) to be successfull. Next time you
have a project you already have that knowledge and you can capitalize on it.
Don't the say that "The doing is often more important than the outcome".

~~~
dylan604
> Don't the say that "The doing is often more important than the outcome".

If you're burning through your own money to bootstrap something, wrong/bad
decisions made early can cost so much time and money it makes it unfeasible to
continue. If you're burning investors money, it's less devastating personally
and you can afford that expensive learning.

------
dpcan
I was a part of a project like this. A LOT of money was dumped into
development, we built stuff from scratch, took months and months of hard work
- and it felt revolutionary.

Then HUGE COMPANY X released the exact same product but 50x further along and
we could never compete.

We all walked away feeling like shit, with a lot of money and time down the
drain, and our tail between our legs. Most of us on the team haven't spoken
since and it's been about 12 years.

Now-days I work on projects where competition doesn't really matter. There's a
lot of other people doing the same thing, but we're all a little different,
and just different enough that everyone who likes these types of products buys
them all if they're good.

~~~
blackrock
What do you make?

~~~
smabie
Adult entertainment?

~~~
blackrock
I was thinking video games. But that can be it too. The guy was so cryptic
about it.

------
rbecker
So, what was the app?

~~~
franky47
I recently found Responsively [1], which looks a lot like OP's Sizzy [2], but
I doubt it's about those apps, because Sizzy has been shipped for a while now,
and Responsively is free (Kitze mentions paying in the article).

[1] [https://github.com/manojVivek/responsively-
app](https://github.com/manojVivek/responsively-app)

[2] [https://sizzy.app](https://sizzy.app)

------
foxylad
Developing without shipping is saying "I know what my (potential) customers
want better than they do". People with big egos may actually believe this; but
I think most people pretend they believe it so no-one ever gets to criticise
their precious.

Either way, it's a monumetally stupid position - just about everything ever
sold has been massively improved by customer feedback.

~~~
tintor
bridges, vaccines, cars, skyscrapers, aeroplanes, ...

~~~
pascalo
For vaccines, the clinical trials are basically customer feedback collection
via closed alpha and beta releases, no?

------
jamil7
The exact thing has happened to me over the years about twice now, even though
some of my more recent apps I have actually shipped... It frustrated me so
much that I decided to not take anymore contracts for a few months and just
put my head down and pump out a few mac / iOS apps I've always wanted to
make...

------
nicbou
I try to release early because it's a lot easier to prioritise issues on
something that's live. I find the motivation to update a live product a lot
easier to find.

It's also a lot easier to improve a product I use than one I'm just running
locally. It also gives the website some time to rank in the search engines.

------
arbuge
But if you ship it, will they come?

For the author, yes, perhaps. He appears to have a sufficiently large
following to help with this.

For the rest of us, finding a way to reach an audience willing to pay will
likely remain the biggest problem.

Which is not to underestimate the discipline required to just ship it.
Everything the author said still applies there.

------
Already__Taken
It's particularly pertinent I've had this tab open for 4 days meaning to read
it. wow.

In that time, I had plans and started an app and decided to leave it for too
long thinking now one would like it. Then that sailing game was on the front
page of HN, that's almost exactly what I was working on.

I also have a pet project in development about making a google sheet more
presentable for users, does that sound familiar to anyone else? Yeh also on
the front page recently, not mine though.

I just keep telling myself, ideas are cheap and don't get bummed out by it.
Good job everyone else executing. I'll still make some of them anyway.

------
crispyporkbites
I'm building a business facing SaaS for a market with about 10 current
incumbents of varying scale (millions to billions of revenue). The technology
is about 40, maybe 50 years old, my stack will be a bit more modern but still
based on ancient specifications.

Once my product is close to parity with the basic competitor offerings (i.e.
copying 1-2 features and ignoring the rest), I'll market it and I'm hoping
that my automation level will give me a massive margin that allows me to
operate at a lower scale and still churn out a decent amount of net profit
each month.

------
cek
"Shipping is a feature too."

------
raverbashing
Money in the bank beats a lot of things

That's why when I hear stories about "being perfectionists" or "you _have_ to
use X technology, because X is perfect/everybody uses it/it's 'best practice'
and the rest are second-class" I get skeptical

Facebook still uses PHP. PHP! Can you imagine if Mark had stopped to rewrite
the thing in, I don't know, Scala because PHP sucks (well, it does, but it
works)?

Aim for money in the bank.

------
ai_ja_nai
(on the refrain of Michael Jackson's "Beat it")

Ship it, ship it

Ship it, ship it

Merge into master and release it

Add some more features, fix some more bugs

it doesn't matter if it don't compiles

Just ship it (just ship it, whoo!)

~~~
ai_ja_nai
ohohoh downvoted xD someone here has bruises and it shows

------
swatson741
This was a funny read. I think a good way of thinking about this problem is:
it's not a matter of shipping the product. That is, putting the product into
market but, a matter of getting your product into customers hands. The market
and shipping is really just a means to that ends. Also, knowing what features
customers need and what features customers can do without helps a lot.

------
dasil003
If this is a habit, then I agree you need to just ship more. On the other
hand, a lot of people ship half-baked stuff and then move on, leaving a trail
of disappointed users and never learning how to actually polish a product. I
guess the latter is marginally better than the former, but I prefer a
goldilocks approach to shipping.

~~~
DonHopkins
Then there's the Halfbakery, where you can share your ideas so you don't have
to half-bake them yourself!

[http://www.halfbakery.com/](http://www.halfbakery.com/)

------
EamonnMR
I spent a few years on a (semi) clone of a game only to have one of the
original creators essentially show up and announce an official remaster. I did
eventually ship, but man if only I'd shipped earlier...

------
ChrisMarshallNY
I’ve been writing ship software almost my entire adult life. Not everything
I’ve written has been good, or successful, but most of it has _shipped_. Some
of it has been quite successful; usually in ways I didn’t plan.

I remember a manager I worked with, once wrote on a whiteboard at our first
project meeting:

 _”The #1 Feature is SHIP.”_

That project was a difficult and ambitious one, with a huge amount of tension
between over-structuring and over-featuring, but it did result in a shipping
product that was quite good, and lasted for a number of years. It’s been
decommissioned for years, but still runs today. My wife still uses it, and
dreads when it will finally die.

The first version wasn’t what we wanted, but it grew into something a lot
better.

I also worked on a project that was killed just before it was to ship, because
it couldn’t meet spec, with all that “between done and ship” stuff.

To this day, I don’t know if we made the right decision, by doing that. I have
never encountered any software that does what it did, anywhere near as well as
it did.

Wasn’t my decision. I would have shipped it. I think it would have
revolutionized the workflow, and set a high bar for everyone else.

In my experience, there’s a _huge_ amount of work that has to happen, between
when we declare it “done,” and when it’s ready to ship. _It’s important to
plan for it._

It’s quite possible to overplan, but, in my experience, it’s a lot more common
to underplan.

Here’s a metaphor that I use[0]:

 _Shipping is boring.

Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months,
but doesn’t open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is
still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives?

That’s because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the
painting, etc., take _forever_, and these are the parts of the building that
see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly
a pigeon toilet. It doesn’t need to be as complete; a solid frame and
watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the
really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done.

I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don’t like making pigeon
toilets._

But that’s just me. YMMV.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220324](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23220324)

------
empath75
If that were me, I’d have sent them an email, I’m sure they’d be happy to talk
to you, just have to be a bit tight lipped about details of what you did until
money changed hands.

------
econcon
Just ship it mantra has worked for me.

I created filament even when my tolerance was slightly off, I managed to label
it +/-0.03mm and sell it in market even with limited colour choice

------
svntid
I loved reading your story Kitze - as you mentioned 99% :-) try to see the
glass half full - always - no matter what.

Stay humble homie.

------
victorbojica
The irony is that he still didn't ship it !! Even when there isn't anything to
lose :(. Please do!

------
hpen
I shipped early, I have no customers. How do I know when to give up?

------
rpiguy
I thought this was going to be about the Boeing 737 MAX.

