Holy crap I'm launching next week.
It's all coming together. I've been working on this thing for almost 5 months, and it all comes at you really quick at the end. Like production keys, bank account, Ad account, final design, final bug fixes, come up with a welcome email, upgrade your heroku nodes...it all just keeps coming at you! Every 10 minutes it feels like there's another weird thing I need to deal with just to get this project out the door and to...well...you people.
Man I hope people like it...
It's a bit overwhelming. I've never been this excited and scared at the same time.
Anybody else feel like this? How do you deal with these jitters?
Congratulations!
You're gonna be totally fine and the jitters will wear off. Just keep doing what you're doing.
Here's something that's counterintuitive, but good to know… after all the build-up, you're going to probably have an energy and emotional let-down. It may take a week or two but you're going to hit a slump. It's totally normal when you've crossed such a big milestone. The key is to set a new milestone and work towards that, to keep the momentum going. (But not as frenzied.)
Can confirm, had an exciting launch, and am in slump. I find that blogging through the whole process - as I'm going through it! has been really helpful!
Journaling gives perspective! It's a superpower for sure!
Good luck on your launch! The first time I launched something, I was a bundle of nerves. I hit "send" to my email list and immediately logged off for the weekend. (Takes a lot of guts, haha!) The next day I woke up to my first sales, and later I had some wine to celebrate. :)
Remember that no one cares about your product as much as you do, so it's okay if there are some technical issues on the first day of launch! You've done great to make it this far.
Somehow it's a bit like the final day before a big exam.
I had a project (Web app) and we had been developing it for a month (Should've been 2 weeks, but after that we wanted to rehaul the design for a "quick ui change" so the project took almost exactly a month.
We had been testing it during development, even had a guy who was in charge of that, somehow sunday 18:00 (we were gonna send it to the client on monday) one of our tables which showed data from a database just broke.
I couldn't switch the tabs, we were dumbfounded, this had been working for months, never had any issues, i spent 2 hours just screaming at it while trying to fix the problem thinking that whatever problem we had was impossible to happen.
Ofcourse, after a lot of debugging & taking things apart i actually managed to find the problem, turned out for some reason we had changed the data in teh database so it was presented in a slightly different order, so when switching tabs (Showing different data but with same keys) an unique edgecase appeared and it was trying to look up data for key X on tab Y which did not exist.
This of course lead me to have to rebuild this table and take this edge case into account, how we never spotted this problem before is beyond me..
All in all i managed to solve the problem quite quickly, and by midnight we were confident enough that it won't break again.
The entire project was a month, and somehow the last 2 days of development was probably the roughest i had.
This reminds me of every product launch I've ever been part of haha! The only difference is this time, I only have myself to blame. I'm confident enough to know I'll fix it if it breaks. That's all I can hope for I think.
Congratulations and good luck on your launch! I think the biggest thing with the launch jitters would be to just remember that it isn't FINAL because you can always update, tweak and rework until its even closer to perfect. Get ready for some user feedback and be prepared to make some happy users!
Congratulations for doing this and good luck for your launch. Currently I have an idea in my head and hope to start working on it soon.
The only way you start is to sit down and start working!
I'm also working 2 jobs and planning a wedding at the same time. You have time too!
The mere thought of this juggling act increases my heart rate.
I'm working on 5 different freelance projects, have 2x kids (6 & 3) and will be launching 2 desktop products next month that I have been working on for TEN years. You have time.
I'm sure Channing of all people understands :)
Not to hijack Tommy's thread but...why have those desktop products taken 10 years to launch?
Briefly, a combination of wantrepreneurism, fear and doubt. I use both apps extensively in my "day job" so I wrote them for myself. More people saw them and said "I want!" but licensing, selling and shipping are a whole new world apart from building. Having kids didn't help the timeline. It's a blog post in itself - or a Microconf talk. One day.
Since you've already been approached by people who've expressed interest, why not just ask them send you payment and provide them with the files? Actual money would show there's real interest and provide you the validation needed.
I would worry about licensing and the whole process only after you've got people to pay you for these.
Valid observation. My only reluctance is if I put unlicensed versions out they will be shared. I have experience with this. I have already validated many aspects of the apps over the years with much smaller versions I shared with various co-workers. Those apps often turn up when I meet new clients who are surprised to learn I wrote some of the stuff they already use and got from someone who got it from someone.... Upside: that has been really good for their confidence in my current stuff so it wasn't a waste at all but I don't want to give away the farm.
That's a reasonable concern :)
Good to know you've validated. What about seeing if people will actually pay for the software though?
Congratz on making it this far, I pray it works out well for you. I just started my project and it'll probably take 5 months as well. I'm not even sure what problems lie ahead, so if you have any pitfalls I should avoid please reply, thanks.
Start nailing down the details as early as possible.
I'm a software engineer by trade, I like building stuff. The business side is what I put off for probably too long. Stuff like starting an LLC, opening a bank account, opening accounts with the APIs and agencies you're using, actually paying for professional grade services, all of that I really should have done earlier.
I told myself it was because I was busy building, but really it was because I was scared. I should have been able to launch this week instead of next, which would have been perfect for SXSW.
I've spent the week networking and handing out business cards while waiting to get paperwork filed and ready. It hasn't been a total loss, but I could have managed it better.
Woop woop and good luck!
Congrats. I'm launching soon as well, and I'm feeling all the feels. Of course, I have some big dev milestones to hit yet, so I don't quite have all the positive excitement to offset the anxiety, but I know it will come! Good luck!
Congrats Tommy! Now that you've told us, you've got to make sure you follow through and post on here with the details ;) Set a reminder (do it!) to post on here next week.
Doesn't matter if you think it's not ready and you don't have to launch everywhere, just launch here and get some feedback first!
Good luck!
Oh yeah, totally. There's always a form of state fright, but the only thing worse than that, is not getting up there. It's the only thing in your way!
Where do you plan on launching?
Keep on pluggin!
I'm launching https://www.Witsi.co to the world next week. The site is actually up and running right now on Heroku, I just have most of the code shut down for everyone but me and a few other users.
I put myself on feature freeze until release, though I have enough stuff in my backlog to take up another few months of work (I think the features I have planned are honestly going to rock some peoples' socks off, but I have to start somewhere). I'm waiting on a few accounts to get fully activated, and to do a final "production run" check with my own accounts to make sure that everything works like I expect.
Witsi is dealing with purchase and bank account information, and I realize that I need to earn people's trust before they're going to be willing to adopt the platform. I plan on pushing things out pretty slowly and trying to nurture that trust as much as I can in the next few months.
That's great! Good luck with the launch.
What places/websites do you plan on launching on?
I'm planning a bit of a social media blitz next week. So you'll see articles here, on medium and wordpress.com, reddit, twitter, facebook, etc.
I'm hoping to ramp up a bit slowly at first, so I can knock the kinks out quickly and we fall down in front of as few people as possible.
Then, hopefully, onto product hunt.
Just launch! There's nothing final in fact :) And "almost 5 months" is not that long. Good luck!
My product is very much "trust" based, so launching before it's really gotten most of the kinks worked out I decided wasn't advisable. But yes, launching as soon as I feel comfortable that it's not just going to blow up :).