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7 Comments

Falling victim to perfectionism

I think the Lakebed MVP is falling victim to what caused my first startup to fail; perfectionism. I have spent my vacation pairing down the MVP list and cleaning up technical debt.

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late. - Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

I'd appreciate any other tips, tools, or techniques people are using to combat this.

Thanks!

on September 5, 2019
  1. 4

    Strip it down to the metal and ship it softly. Don't do a full launch straight away, but keep it "public" on the web.

    There's no point optimising for sales right now (with fancy landing pages and a ton of value-add features etc..), this is the time for experimentation and iteration. I'd suggest finding someone in meatspace who might have a use for it and work with them - even if they don't use your product, a conversation is still a ton more data points than you had before.

    Honestly, you won't remember launch day. You'll remember the first paycheck.

    1. 2

      Thanks, great advice. I'm hearing a lot, and agree, launch is not as big a deal as you think. My wife and co-founder sat down with me this morning and nicely reminded me that I do actually have an MVP April I just don't have marketing or sales yet.

  2. 3

    Start up School has a lecture about this. https://www.startupschool.org/videos/65

    Basically do you remember what AirBnb MVP was... No you dont and btw it was not great.. so dont worry about your first release.

  3. 2

    Do less, but do it better.

    Ask yourself: am I trying to ship only the essential functionality of my product? Or am I trying to squeeze in nice-to-haves?

    Sometimes you may not know what is essential and what is nice-to-have. In that case you should just ship and find out!

  4. 2

    I've made a news website once with a cool comment section with summaries and people could add their own summaries and so on (feature creep). I spent a lot of time on the comment section page and when I launched everybody stayed on the first page and almost no one clicked on the comment page.

    So I think launching early + using analytics + looking the users over their shoulder (maybe with something like hotjar) helps you to optimize where to spend your time better.

  5. 1

    Thanks for the like @asebold, I sent Fantasy Congress to my wife who is starting at the SFU Centre for Dialogue.

    1. 2

      Haha awesome! Thanks! btw I too have been falling victim to perfectionism. Though my excuse is that I'm working on the 2.0, "post MVP" version, so I feel like it HAS to be better.

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