I delayed launch 7 times!
Hi everyone,
I'm Miguel, and I'm a solo indie hacker.
And I'm currently building staq.xyz
Today I delayed the launch of it one more time. Making it the 7th time!
A little about me: I work a full-time job, as a web developer, and I'm also finishing my degree. And I'm working on the project on the side, whenever time comes up.
I'm not adding more features, over and over again, I'm just making it usable.
How do you manage to launch on time?
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As many comments above mentioned, I believe lunching an MVP is the best way.
Even if it has bugs, as long as it is usable and the main feature is present. Once this is done, I think showing it to a maximum of targeted users is a good idea, to see if the community enjoy it, see if they are interested in the product and potentially get some precious feedbacks!
Maybe even approach some "ideal" users, and invite them to a beta and see if they are interested in the product, and again get some noice feedbacks!!
I will do that. Just some more adjustments. And I will release maybe to a private BETA.
I hear you. I've been sitting under a rock myself. But have really made significant progress by reading everyone elses experience etc. I first started of wanting to build the perfect product and then went back to the drawing board and stripped off most of it and kept it to the bare minimum to validate the idea. MVP is supposed to be simple. But you know what! I realised that simple is SO HARD. Keep at it.
The way my project works, so much moving parts, (external services, queue, cron jobs...). Building an MVP still takes some time. And as I only work on it, after my full time job, it can take some time to have something ready!
Thank you! I will try to release as fast as I can.
This was us with our last startup. Our mistake was spending 6 months engineering the product till we felt like it was "perfect" to launch; we'd delay the launch weeks at a time.
Once we got around to launching, we got an initial spike then everything went flat — we learned that one of the features that we spent 2 extra months engineering wasn't being used at all by our users (expectation vs. reality) so we could've saved ourselves a whole 2 months if we had just launched earlier.
We're trying not to repeat the same mistake this time with our new startup — spent 2.5 weeks building the MVP and just launched this past week here: https://infisical.com
My thought would be to just launch as soon as possible even if the product is half-baked; you'll whole learn a lot.
"we learned that one of the features that we spent 2 extra months engineering wasn't being used at all by our users (expectation vs. reality) so we could've saved ourselves a whole 2 months if we had just launched earlier."
I've never think that, but it is a very good point! I will relook some features, and see if they are really needed.
Thank you so much, for sharing this.
And congrats really good looking landing page!
Thanks!
To elaborate, we were working on a micro-podcasting platform and spent 2 extra months building out tooling functionalities before launching (e.g. trimming, splitting, stitching/re-ordering segments, noise-reduction).
It seemed really logical to us that users would want to produce high-quality micro-podcasts and edit their content to perfection. When we launched though, we found that users tended to record themselves in one go and post; they'd also rather re-record themselves speaking than spend time editing their recordings.
You'd be surprised at how some of the most logical assumptions could turn out completely wrong...
Anyways, I hope this helps :)
Thank you for sharing real world experience, really made my day. I always enjoy to ear real world experience!
Thank you so much.
No problem. Good luck!
Launch as MVP - Minimal valuable product. Only features/feature that is/are needed to show idea of app. As soon as your app/web/service or anything is on Store/online you can do updates. Update app with one or two features and bug fixes and it will slowly grow. Trust me. And you can also validate the main idea/concept of product.
I'm developing basic functionality. But only on my spare time, so it takes longer. And when developing sometimes a bug shows up, and I just can't ignore it.
Publish even with bugs if they are not minor, there will be bugs that you can't even imagine :D Early adopters will find what you will never be able to.
Write down the main functionality and complete it - i know its sound' silly but... I mean write it down on paper, chalkboard - something physical is better than digital
Those thing that are not perfect: You don't need to ignore them, just write them down and you can fix it ANYTIME after launch. First users will be impressed after time. So don't be scared of what they will think about it. Leaving those imperfect things will just move you to continue developing published version.
I am think that you've done even some "nice to have" features/graphics so skip them for now if those are not ready and add them later.
There is one more advice I can give you for your current and future projects: Set yourself a specific time interval, like 1 - 2 hours a day/weekend and if you can't get your MVP or at least some prototype in week or two/ month or two just move on another idea of course the size of project and skills matter.
@PeterTheiOSDeveloper Just a few more tweaks, and I will release it! Thank you so much for taking your time to help me!
Just one more thing, I will need to charge my customers, because I can't offer it for free, because of infrastructure costs. How do I deal with that? Bill for a not perfect/polished product?
That's so nice to hear. It looks very promising. I have no experience with pricing. My both products/apps ColorNoise for Mac and Play&Sing for iPad are free now. But I have an idea how you can do it:
Charge very minimum to run the app for first let say 10...100...1000 users(I don't know how many users out there requested early access ) but this number and price should be based on this.
For these users keep the minimum price forever and inform them later about it - that they have special price over new users. I think they will spread the word about it. Or keep the minimum price if they will bring 3 more users for at least one month(I think that you want to charge monthly)
Maybe better will be to charge yearly - that sounds better but some trial is needed.
I don't know much about how you want to do that and how you need, so I am just typing what I think...
Some numbers and info can help me to come up with something. But as I said, I have no experience with pricing.
I just saw your timer on site https://staq.xyz so you maybe figured it out, so let us know here.
I will let you know for sure! Thank you for taking some time to share this.
Note: I will price it lower now, and when I figure it out more about running costs. I will update it.
I did the exact same thing multiple time. The important thing is that you keep having a somewhat reachable launch target and that you eventually launch at one point.
Don't wait for the perfect product, launch when it's somewhat useful and usable.
It's super hard to plan for a release date when you develop a product: there are always some things that didn't work as expected, some bug that need to be worked on, etc... Delaying it multiple time is perfectly normal for an early stage project.
And keep in mind that you'll probably soft launch your product before putting a lot of effort in marketing, so it's not too bad if there are still some bugs. It's to be expected.
(But yeah, if your product is unusable and/or useless, it's probably not ready yet)
I really needed to hear THIS
"Don't wait for the perfect product, launch when it's somewhat useful and usable."
Thank you!!
"Don't wait for the perfect product", this is really a big problem for me.
Because sometimes, something don't look or works the way I want. And I'm not capable of ignore it.
But I'm working on not making things 100%.
We don't manage to launch on time 😆 We postponed the launch of https://tolt.io a few times as well :P
Launch it when you think it's ready! Just don't overbuild it.
@yxngdano very cool website! It really helps knowing that I'm not the only one! Thank you so much!
Miguel it's ok to delay a little bit when you have other things going on.
I would say once you have time for it don't delay based on how good/bad the product is, but think if 100 users tried it, would more than 1 use it? Then launch!
If you feel kinda embarrassed about the first version that is totally okay. I wish I had put my first MVP out there ages ago. Would have saved a lot of time and effort!
I want users to have a good first experience. And release something not 100% ready, still lets me anxious.
Totally understand the feeling. But most of the time, even the early users know that this is a first version of your product.
Hope this helps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_wwJYcJSIA
I wanted to mention the post I've read, related to this video, on the comment: "Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't get the hype around "launching". Your either open for business, or you are not" but I could not remember where I read it.
Thank you so much!
I understand your struggles, friend.
When I first released my MVP I was planning on releasing around April and ended up releasing only in late June/July. These are WEEKS of delays!
Obviously there needed to be a fully functioning product or at least something that was good enough to sustain user retention.
It's been quite difficult frankly and the only way I managed to make it work around my schedule is quite frankly giving up on my own personal time so I work during the mornings until 5pm and then after 8-9pm I'm back to work again until 2 am and wake up again at 7am.
It's absolutely physically/emotionally/psychologically devastating as a schedule but if you want to make things work you'll need to find the means necessary. I am a one-man band after all building the full stack of the product.
Since I've seen people sharing their projects here's mine: https://tradingmaster.io/
Time is a finite source and pushing yourself early on is a bit like an initial sprint to get yourself running.
Just don't do it too much or you'll burn out so take breaks or if you don't want to do it at night, consider weekends for you to work on it.
You need to make every minute count, it's the only tangible way to achieve goals.
Good time management and good scheduling of works will let you meet goals and deadlines. It's not easy but you can do it if you set your mind to it.
"giving up on my own personal time" this is a hard one. I really love build my product. But it becomes hard when you see your close ones doing things you also wanted to do.
Think of your product as a baby - you can't just leave it there and let it grow itself, it needs constant nurturing at the cost of your own sleeping schedule until it's grown to the point where it can take care of itself.
It's the same paradigm shift you see when your business goes from the:
-Drains money
-Drains time
-Needs YOUR attention 24/7
To becoming:
-Makes you more money than you need
-You've got all the time in the world
-You could close the door, lock it and throw away the key and it'd still continue to grow and improve
When you overcome that stage and you can automate/delegate it is when you finally stop owning a product but own a business rather than a heavily demanding self-employed job.
Probably an unpopular opinion, but I don't get the hype around "launching". Your either open for business, or you are not.
Take a look at http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html "8. Slowness in Launching" and "9. Launching Too Early"
Thats very true. But some consider "launching" very important others don't. It really depends on the person.
We definitely agree on this. :)
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