How do you handle releasing large features as an Indie Hacker?
I recently released part of a large feature for my email creation / newsletter platform https://postheat.com (the feature is email templates - which allow users to use pre-built HTML layouts for building emails). I spent several weeks working on this, then I decided to release it even though the feature is not 100% complete.
My thoughts are that as long as the partial feature does not have any bugs or obvious problems, then it's OK to release large features in a few stages.
Creating small releases could also be good because you can get feedback at each stage of the large feature release.
The cons are that the product could look unfinished, or users may not like the feel of an "unfinished" feature when comparing a product vs. its competitors.
How do you usually handle large feature releases if you are a solo indie hacker? Any advice on handling this balancing act?
Finally, someone thinking in more than "lets build it in 1-hour" scale.
Releasing it in increments is definitely the way to go. I'm not sure how you design your features, but I recommend you always think about a feature upfront (how it will interact with the rest of your app), split it in several sub-features which you implement one by one. I have an "internal" version that only a few people are subscribed to - and they test the feature. The outside world doesn't see the feature until I decide to.
Once I'm confident with it, I release it to the public -- just in case there are still bugs, I do quite a bit of logging, so I can figure out what happened.
I also have an decently easy way to replicate what the customer is experiencing -- it's not 100% reliable, but pretty close. In my case, I work on a video editor, and I have a way for people to archive their projects and send them over (this way I can see their full project, and gather a better understanding of how an issue occurred).
I highly recommend you find a way to replicate as much as possible a user's scenario on your machine. This is a tough nut to crack, but if you do it successfully, implementing large features will become a lot easier.
you can feature flag it, and release it to your power users as Beta or have an invite and those that sign up get it 2 weeks or a month before everyone else.