✅ Building Zoye, Part 4 - The First Version Was Broken

Our first working version was held together with hope.

I'm being specific on purpose. Founders online skip from "we had an idea" to "we launched" and quietly leave out the part where the thing barely stands up.

It did work, in the narrow sense. You could talk to it and it would create something. But the edges were everywhere. It would do the right thing and then fail to tell you it had done it. It would understand a sentence perfectly and then fall apart on the same sentence phrased slightly differently.

The temptation at that stage is to keep it hidden until it's respectable. We nearly did. What changed our mind was a simple realization: we were the worst possible testers of our own product. We knew exactly which words to use. We unconsciously avoided every path we knew was broken. We weren't using it, we were performing a demo for ourselves.

So we put it in front of a few real people instead. Not a launch, not a waitlist. A handful of users we could talk to directly, who were willing to use something rough and tell us the truth.

That decision changed the product more than any other thing we did that year.

💬 Question to you: How rough was your first version when you first showed it to someone outside the team?