

The danger of releasing too early - gojko
http://gojko.net/2009/11/23/the-danger-of-releasing-too-early/

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IsaacL
The examples the author cites:

\- a film which was released in 'beta' at Cannes, giving it a bad name

\- voice-recognition of contact names for mobiles, where the technology became
widespread before it was usable

\- his own experience of demoing a product without a nice interface to a
client, causing the client to lose faith in the project.

What is the commonality between these three scenarios that isn't generally
shared by web startups? (I don't know if the article was aimed at web
startups, but it's relevant here). Each time, the crappy version 1 was shown
to a large segment or some key players in the market (film critics, a huge
number of mobile phone owners, and the sole client), and put them off the
product.

I have a friend who is worried about this for his web startup. "If people see
it when it looks crap, they won't come back". The thing with web startups is
the few hundred people who might see it in the crappy phase will likely be a
very small slice of your total market.

~~~
mixmax
They'll also be the influential trendsetters and first movers in the market
niche you're trying to get into, lending credibility to OP's argument.

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vessenes
What I attach to here is the idea that buzz comes from very rapid assessments
made by a target audience.

It's such a classic engineering mistake to demo their perfect casino server
with crappy graphics on the front-end: I've made that mistake many times.

Engineers frequently fail to understand what non-engineers care about and
need. Anyway, I like the general ideas he presents, but I think that his film
and casino project stories would have been really different if rather than
sending something that had all the technical guts in place, they sent
something flashy which still needed plumbing work.

In the case of the movie, this could have been 10 minutes of awesomeness.

In the case of the casino thing, this could have been a cheapo flash demo made
by some uber-designer, with a lot of handwaving on the back-end.

Both of these would have yielded better results than showing real state of the
projects.

I guess I believe that nobody cares about plumbing except plumbers /
engineers. Unless engineers are going to buy your product (and they'll still
likely have to demo it for a non-engineer to get a purchase okay), I think it
makes a huge amount of sense to aim for some initial flash.

Probably nobody needs this advice more than me, so I'm going to read it back
to myself every day for a week in the hopes that it will stick..

~~~
mattrepl
Directed Edge's landing page (<http://directededge.com>) is a good example of
communicating product capabilities to non-technical folks.

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megamark16
I really like the car analogy he makes: If your client asks for a car and you
want to iterate, don't show them a frame with wheels on it, show them a
skateboard. A skateboard is useful in its own right, although it doesn't have
all of the features that they will want in the end. Iterate to a bike, a
motorcycle, and finally a car, but at each stage you have something that works
on its own.

There was another article on HN a while ago about differentiating between
features and core functionality, and making sure to focus on the core
functionality first before you try to add the extras. Also, knowing which
parts of the UI/UX are part of the core functionality is important, as is
illustrated in the author's demo product fiasco anecdote. As a developer I
tend to focus more on the back end functionality and supporting systems, but
something can be technically beautiful and still look like useless crap to
your intended users.

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vgurgov
Nice post, had similar experiences few times when i blamed myself for too
early delivery.

The problem with agile or iterative process(although i am a big fan of it) is
that some clients (usually non techs) are just not ready for that! But its
amazing how many Project managers still cant understand that most of clients
just DONT NEED their product to be shown week earlier but without nice design
it meant to have. They are so much inspired with books and articles about
“release early and iterate” that they just assume that client will be also
happy to be iterative. So they forget about more fundamental rule -keep your
client happy all the time! So keep that in mind before you decide to go agile
make sure that client is fine with it, understand it and manage his
expectations carefully!

