
Ask HN: How perfect was your app when you launched it? - ziyadparekh
How perfect was your app&#x2F;website when you launched it? Were there issues (bugs, bottlenecks, bad code)? Did you wait until all outstanding issues were ironed out until you launched it? Or did you let it out in the wild and fix it as issues came up ?
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animeshk
My team and I launched our product about 17 days ago. It's might look better
than an MVP, but it's literally just that. We're trying to identify the users
who would love using even the crappiest version of our product.

With over 300 users now, it turns out they do want browser extensions and
mobile app. So our product is far from perfect. You can have a look at it -

[http://www.searchtrack.co](http://www.searchtrack.co).

SearchTrack helps teams and individuals collaborate to save content, contacts,
products and services around any topic. Best of all, you can share your
research with the community so others in need can spend more time learning and
implementing from your collection of rich resources (than they would, in
finding and organizing those).

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pedalpete
I took over a project 8 months ago which had been running for 2.5 years.

It was far from perfect when it launched, was still far from perfect when I
took over, and I'm going to guess it is going to take a year or so before it
gets to a point that I'm even happy with it.

The issues are plenty.

It looked horrible when I took over, and though we've done a redesign, it is
still not a beautiful app.

Bottlenecks galore! Very slow page load times, parts of the app where we
wanted to improve the UX are so duct-taped together we can barely touch it and
are biding our time to do a re-write.

Dead code, confusing code, poorly thought out code. This has all of it. I even
lost a developer because he was so frustrated with the code structure.

So, how bad can this all be?

We've got a large base of dedicated users that love the product, we're growing
nicely (though growth is somewhat held back as we can't release features and
improvements as quickly as we'd like).

Ignore the 'perfect', it's never perfect (but definitely aim for 'good
enough'). Having users that love the product is much more important than it
being perfect.

Also, what app do you think is or was perfect when it launched? Facebook sure
as hell wasn't perfect. Twitter? Clearly not.

Nobody is perfect, give that up. The perfect time to launch an app is when it
is perfect enough to get feedback.

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mattkrea
"If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve
launched too late."

Unless you are some kind of a wizard, waiting to clean everything up before
making sure you are doing the right thing is probably a bad idea.

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hendersonsam456
The lean start-up would say: \- launch early \- test with your users what
needs fixing \- fix it (and don't bother fixing the stuff that the user's
don't care about).

I think there is a legitimate caveat to this though. If you're app does
something where failure leads to death or some other really bad outcome (might
be medical software), then being super lean is probably not advised. But in
the main, launch early, test, fix and repeat.

