The saddest “Just Ship It” story

&quot;just ship it&quot; is just as dumb as &quot;never ship it&quot;. Why are people so prone to these oversimplified polarazations?<p>Also, if I learned anything over the last few decades it is that the market supports many solutions to the same problem. Why do software developers believe that if someone gets there first that&#x27;s it it&#x27;s done? Someone invented and sells a toaster? Done. Someone started selling bikes? Better ditch my step design. Cars? Just one brand, obviously.<p>People release apps into oversaturated markets every day. Most fail, some do well, and not because they were better in every way than the competition, just because they were different, they were tried, and some people found them to be &#x27;Good Enough&#x27;.

I&#x27;m in this same boat, but 8... EIGHT YEARS LATER! that competitor went out of business, and I bought them, their customers, and everything because I know the way I had more efficiently solved some of the same problems will let me run that business profitably.

I just saw, after over 18 months of off and on development, that some other company has exactly implemented my idea, minus one key feature. They did a really great comprehensive job.<p>After wailing and licking my wounds for a day I decided that just because they’ve done that doesn’t mean the game is over. I actually decided it was an advantage because I could just copy their approach to solving certain thorny UI challenges.<p>Also, it’s validation for my idea. Until I saw that I thought maybe the idea was just a pipe dream.<p>It’s dumb to drop a project just cause someone else did it.<p>Maybe programmers tend to give up when they see someone else did it because programmers think the code is the business or the code is the win or the code is the success or something, when in fact success is much more than the code.

Sometimes it&#x27;s not just about shipping but also about knowing how to approach it and having the vision. Case in point - many many years ago, around 2004 or 2005, I built this stupid app with a couple of friends - it was a text message based gossip app where you can share updates on celeb spotting and subscribe to get notifications by tags or locations. Whatever. It didn&#x27;t pick up understandably (it had like 200 users in our city), but we thought maybe we&#x27;ll pivot it:<p>We aggregated the reports into a website with a nice feed, and then we thought, what if instead of one feed about celebs, people could just post whatever they want via text messages and others could follow them and get the texts or view the feed of these short (140 characters or so?) posts on a website? It would be kinda cool.<p>But mobile providers would not allow us to send media messages, and we thought the idea just kinda sucked and is not worth a start-up, especially since now we have group text messaging in newer phones! And MMS support that we don&#x27;t have.<p>So yeah, I&#x27;ve basically written a proto-Twitter a bit before Twitter existed (the gossip version also predated Gawker Stalker by a year), but the harsh reality is that it didn&#x27;t take off because of me and the people I worked on this with weren&#x27;t made of the stuff of people who start billion dollar companies.

This happened to me in 2010. I love hiking, and when you get to the top of a mountain one of the things you do is look at all the other mountains and figure out which ones they are. It’s called name-that-peak. Sometimes at scenic overlooks there’s a nice hand-drawn placard with all the peaks labeled, so I wanted to make an app to do that.<p>When I started, there was kind of a website to do this already, but it was absolutely awful and I knew I could do way better.<p>So I did. I spent 100-150 hours working out all the math and coding up the program to reproduce that placard from terrain data. I still have all my notes. It was kinda slow — one panorama took 4-6 minutes to draw — but it worked.<p>And then I didn’t ship. Life got in the way, and it was always harder for me to do the second 50% than the first, even though in this case the first 50% was way harder.<p>Three years later, one of my friends shared an app with me, just released. It did the same thing. The author did a good job describing how I felt then too, how the app was good but I hated it anyway. I never used it, probably because I ended up moving overseas anyway to a place without free high-res terrain data.<p>That was my best chance to date to do something I’ve always dreamed about: make something cool that a lot of people love to use. Novel, good ideas like that don’t come along very often.

&gt; After 2 years of development, juggling between the fucking horror that&#x27;s the web platform, React Native, Expo, GraphQL, bitching about how there&#x27;s no ideal tech stack, the good old jQuery and Filezilla days, switching to other projects, releasing other apps, losing passion, finding passion, coming back to the app, etc. etc. etc...<p>&gt; I just dropped it.<p>This sounds like a great project and a really good outcome. OP learned a lot and the project provided motivation for him to explore interesting tech and gain real insights about the drawbacks of each. If I had gotten that much of all my side projects that would be great!<p>If your expectation is that each side project will turn into an Instagram style success story, you’ll most likely never be happy.

One thing I find useful to remember is that every new feature is a new blog post, a new social media post, and more opportunities to promote yourself. Shipping with all the features is basically taking away a lot of those opportunities. Whereas if you ship small, you can keep creating buzz about yourself for the next two years and bring a lot of users on the journey.

To me this sounds like the 1-in-a-thousand project that was commercially right on the money, that was an exception to the general rule.<p>I&#x27;ve released projects, but no one gave a damn. If someone could figure out how to monetize on parallel tracks, some idea that I had... well, cool. I couldn&#x27;t.<p>This ain&#x27;t 2000, when you could be just name any service, google to see if it was on the Internet, and just throw it on there to start raking in the big bucks.<p>Most projects die of disinterest. So, it doesn&#x27;t matter if you release, or not: it&#x27;ll die anyway.<p>To do better, you have to either have marketing, or a product that solves a real market problem.<p>But that process isn&#x27;t that easy, and if you weren&#x27;t intentional from the beginning about this, you&#x27;re probably not losing much, talking your time to learn something well.

This story implies there can only be 1 or something in the market.<p>This is not true at all. Almost everything has more than 1 competitor.<p>Ship what you have.

I think this is an issue with software developers. They think &quot;if I just build it&quot; but I look at that story and think &quot;they weren&#x27;t really serious. The other developer <i>probably</i> gathered a team of 5+ people and together they did all of the things the lone software dev didn&#x27;t want to do. Sales, Marketing, Docs, Websites, sign up, customer service, etc etc etc.<p>I can ship a library or a demo or a small stand alone thing but it can be 10x commitment to actually ship a real service. Deciding to actually do the other 90% of the work is a pretty big hurdle for many, me included.

Shipping is important. It&#x27;s a nice feeling to get it out there. But to imagine that if you&#x27;d just shipped it then everyone would be using your app instead of someone else&#x27;s is nonsense. You&#x27;re in full control of shipping. Getting distribution for your software - getting it to really take off - is super super hard. Being an engineer, I think we tend to gloss over this part.<p>I&#x27;m working on a product in a very crowded space (issue tracking [0]). Shipping is the easy part. The day to day grind to find distribution and drive more and more users to your product, that&#x27;s the tough bit.<p>0: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kitemaker.co" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kitemaker.co</a>

This guy is hilarious. I actually laughed reading this line: &quot;Every time I&#x27;ll get a payment notification it&#x27;s gonna feel like stepping on a lego&quot;<p>Anyway FWIW it&#x27;s good and not bad that you found a successful competitor doing what you wanted to do. It is not the end of the line rather somebody else has validated the idea for you. The only time you should actually worry is when you can&#x27;t find one single competing product to what you&#x27;re building.<p>BTW as you put it that their app is slow buggy, there seems to be a lot of room for improvement and so it&#x27;s still not too late and maybe time to outshine your competition and eat&#x2F;share their lunch.

A few years ago I came up with this orders portal idea at work,which nothing special on its own,but was unique to the industry. My manager blocks it on the basis that it isn&#x27;t easy enough to use and our clients would definitely need a,b,c features. Eventually we drop it all together. After some time, my manager quits and I took over his position. After a few months I have a meeting with sales,who are asking how long would it take to create an orders portal. I explain a bit about my previous attempt in a vague manner and they tell me that anything woul be better than nothing and should work on it. We launch after few weeks.I tell the rest of the management about my new ingenious solution. Clients love it. It&#x27;s basic but it&#x27;s zillion times better than anything they had before. The thing is now part of the offering to large corporates and it did help to win some nice contracts. The portal is still buggy,a bit hard to use, have very few features and so on.

If I was him I&#x27;d be shipping it immediately after seeing that. If anything it&#x27;s encouraging and you should be highly motivated to make your product better knowing that there is competition out there that are actually converting customers. There&#x27;s very few ideas on the internet that can only sustain one party tackling them. When this guy notices in another 2 years that there&#x27;s now 3 other people who have launched a similar service while he sat idly by he&#x27;s going to feel even more silly.

To remove pressure from yourself as an indie dev look at shipping as a starting point, not a critical event that needs to be perfect. It will be messy, it always is, BUT there&#x27;s a lot of value in real feedback and will give you ideas you would have not had otherwise.<p>A quote from Kevin Ashton: &quot;Nothing begins good, but everything good begins. Everything can be revised, erased, or rearranged later. The courage of creation is making bad beginnings.

I&#x27;ve been in the same boat for 12 years now. I have a litany of half-complete revolutionary ideas. Believe it or not, I was working on a HelloFresh type product in 2008, before HelloFresh even existed. The exact same premise, except my idea required no pantry staples: every ingredient in the box from oil to sauce. People told me I was crazy, but look at services like that now...<p>It is hard to get out of the mindset of just shipping something, because I was raised and taught that first impressions matter.

A few years back I released an app that was almost a direct copy of another app. It’s made enough to buy a Tesla S. Never let people say “How is your idea different from X?” Honestly, sometimes it doesn’t have to be... much or at all.

First app I wrote professionally I shipped 2 years ago.<p>Half the stuff I would have spent more time on before remain on my list and nobody has asked for.<p>Meanwhile I spent time adding and adjusting completely different features.<p>Another related app I created (sort of a companion app)...went in another direction that I wouldn&#x27;t have predicted.<p>Things change dramatically in production. It seems obvious at times but how people use an app and what they want &quot;now&quot; is hard to know.

My favorite just ship it story is the software to control the first SpaceX droneship landing attempt. The developers told Elon that there&#x27;d be no way the code could be ready in two weeks. He asked if they could give a 50% shot, they said yes so they shipped the code:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=L6T8mn6LD2E</a><p>Of course they did learn a ton.

“Just Ship It” mentality produces this kind of sad outcomes <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.ccc.de&#x2F;v&#x2F;36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_crashes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;media.ccc.de&#x2F;v&#x2F;36c3-10961-boeing_737max_automated_cr...</a>

I think this story is less about shipping the product and more about treating a product as a product and treating a hobby as a hobby. If you&#x27;re working on a new project that you think should be a business, you need to atleast have an idea going in what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve success. I feel like you could read the next blog post in this series and it will say<p>&gt;&quot;I learned to &quot;Just Ship it&quot; but I thought &quot;If I build it they will come&quot;<p>And then it&#x27;ll be about how putting some code out the door isn&#x27;t the same thing as launching a product.

The biggest reason to ship it is to start learning what you don’t know yet as early as you can.

This happened to me a long time ago - i was making a &quot;social&quot; type product that was location based and a competitor launched theirs too but their founders were famous and they got loads of users straight away. In social, network effects matter so launching first does have a large benefit especially if the idea is new.<p>I gave up on the idea a few months later but kept an eye on the project. It didn&#x27;t take off the way it was supposed to, and I have a feeling that if I was still working on my version I could have pivoted and taken advantage of what I was learning by watching them faster than they could have (they had so many users etc to support)!<p>And that was in social - in most other products network effects are nowhere near as powerful e.g. I tried linear.app for a side project even though i actually enjoy using lira at work. Since i have many projects it&#x27;s easy to try new things on some and drop &#x2F; change what doesn&#x27;t work.<p>I think the &quot;just ship it&quot; oversimplification comes from the fact that getting user feedback is vital for most products. It doesn&#x27;t mean that launching first is the goal though. The product I&#x27;m working on now is in a super crowded space (landing page creation) but it has an edge over others for a particular type of market (developers who don&#x27;t want to mess around with UI, drag and drop etc but still want beauty and control) and even though the product is &quot;ready&quot; im not &quot;just ship it&quot;-ing because I&#x27;m busy &quot;talking to users&quot;.

I have experienced creating products.<p>For me, &quot;just ship it&quot; is a totally wrong advice to give, in the same way as &quot;we will ship is when is ready&quot;(and never is ready).<p>You have to plan ahead, know your limitations and say NO to adding things you can not complete on time. And you have to plan for things that look simple being much harder to implement in practice.<p>You need discipline for saying no, and it is not as funny as just trying new things all the time(new languages, new platforms, new methodologies, new projects). But you are an adult, not a kid, you should be able to control yourself(and most people can&#x27;t BTW, they drink coffee and smoke because they need external controls instead of internal).<p>You should try new things, but not too much. It takes time for being efficient and master something. There are diminishing returns too but productivity while learning something new is almost zero compared with the master.<p>How much is too much? It depends on your specific job.<p>I recommend people to write down and document the actual real work that something takes on calendars and their expectations.<p>Over a period of time, you will be able to compare your expectations to your actual work in detail. You will surprise yourself where you spend most of your time.<p>Then you will be able to take decisions and say NO to those areas that take most of your time and give you back little on future projects.

Something that makes me a bit reluctant to &quot;just ship it&quot; is that you can post things on HN and producthunt only once, so often I&#x27;m motivated until I do that, so that my launch is more succesful, but then later I think: Only a few users, is it even worth it to keep working on this? I wish it was possible to keep people who upvoted&#x2F;liked your product updated. Or maybe poll them on things like: Would this feature be valuable to you?

Then there are ideas you just don&#x27;t get around to... <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.procrastinationjournal.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.procrastinationjournal.com&#x2F;</a>

Being first to market is overrated, once the market is established you have much better information on how you can carve out your slice, whether that be on pricing or some other point of difference.<p>Even the established players in a field get complacent or too large to move quickly to address an emerging need and leave themselves open to disruption.

You did not lose time, you learned. You could have built and shipped, it still would have needed a lot of effort (and luck) to be successfull. Next time you have a project you already have that knowledge and you can capitalize on it. Don&#x27;t the say that &quot;The doing is often more important than the outcome&quot;.

I was a part of a project like this. A LOT of money was dumped into development, we built stuff from scratch, took months and months of hard work - and it felt revolutionary.<p>Then HUGE COMPANY X released the exact same product but 50x further along and we could never compete.<p>We all walked away feeling like shit, with a lot of money and time down the drain, and our tail between our legs. Most of us on the team haven&#x27;t spoken since and it&#x27;s been about 12 years.<p>Now-days I work on projects where competition doesn&#x27;t really matter. There&#x27;s a lot of other people doing the same thing, but we&#x27;re all a little different, and just different enough that everyone who likes these types of products buys them all if they&#x27;re good.

So, what was the app?

Developing without shipping is saying &quot;I know what my (potential) customers want better than they do&quot;. People with big egos may actually believe this; but I think most people pretend they believe it so no-one ever gets to criticise their precious.<p>Either way, it&#x27;s a monumetally stupid position - just about everything ever sold has been massively improved by customer feedback.

The exact thing has happened to me over the years about twice now, even though some of my more recent apps I have actually shipped... It frustrated me so much that I decided to not take anymore contracts for a few months and just put my head down and pump out a few mac &#x2F; iOS apps I&#x27;ve always wanted to make...

I try to release early because it&#x27;s a lot easier to prioritise issues on something that&#x27;s live. I find the motivation to update a live product a lot easier to find.<p>It&#x27;s also a lot easier to improve a product I use than one I&#x27;m just running locally. It also gives the website some time to rank in the search engines.

But if you ship it, will they come?<p>For the author, yes, perhaps. He appears to have a sufficiently large following to help with this.<p>For the rest of us, finding a way to reach an audience willing to pay will likely remain the biggest problem.<p>Which is not to underestimate the discipline required to just ship it. Everything the author said still applies there.

It&#x27;s particularly pertinent I&#x27;ve had this tab open for 4 days meaning to read it. wow.<p>In that time, I had plans and started an app and decided to leave it for too long thinking now one would like it. Then that sailing game was on the front page of HN, that&#x27;s almost exactly what I was working on.<p>I also have a pet project in development about making a google sheet more presentable for users, does that sound familiar to anyone else? Yeh also on the front page recently, not mine though.<p>I just keep telling myself, ideas are cheap and don&#x27;t get bummed out by it. Good job everyone else executing. I&#x27;ll still make some of them anyway.

I&#x27;m building a business facing SaaS for a market with about 10 current incumbents of varying scale (millions to billions of revenue). The technology is about 40, maybe 50 years old, my stack will be a bit more modern but still based on ancient specifications.<p>Once my product is close to parity with the basic competitor offerings (i.e. copying 1-2 features and ignoring the rest), I&#x27;ll market it and I&#x27;m hoping that my automation level will give me a massive margin that allows me to operate at a lower scale and still churn out a decent amount of net profit each month.

&quot;Shipping is a feature too.&quot;

Money in the bank beats a lot of things<p>That&#x27;s why when I hear stories about &quot;being perfectionists&quot; or &quot;you <i>have</i> to use X technology, because X is perfect&#x2F;everybody uses it&#x2F;it&#x27;s &#x27;best practice&#x27; and the rest are second-class&quot; I get skeptical<p>Facebook still uses PHP. PHP! Can you imagine if Mark had stopped to rewrite the thing in, I don&#x27;t know, Scala because PHP sucks (well, it does, but it works)?<p>Aim for money in the bank.

(on the refrain of Michael Jackson&#x27;s &quot;Beat it&quot;)<p>Ship it, ship it<p>Ship it, ship it<p>Merge into master and release it<p>Add some more features, fix some more bugs<p>it doesn&#x27;t matter if it don&#x27;t compiles<p>Just ship it (just ship it, whoo!)

This was a funny read. I think a good way of thinking about this problem is: it&#x27;s not a matter of shipping the product. That is, putting the product into market but, a matter of getting your product into customers hands. The market and shipping is really just a means to that ends. Also, knowing what features customers need and what features customers can do without helps a lot.

If this is a habit, then I agree you need to just ship more. On the other hand, a lot of people ship half-baked stuff and then move on, leaving a trail of disappointed users and never learning how to actually polish a product. I guess the latter is marginally better than the former, but I prefer a goldilocks approach to shipping.

I spent a few years on a (semi) clone of a game only to have one of the original creators essentially show up and announce an official remaster. I did eventually ship, but man if only I&#x27;d shipped earlier...

I’ve been writing ship software almost my entire adult life. Not everything I’ve written has been good, or successful, but most of it has <i>shipped</i>. Some of it has been quite successful; usually in ways I didn’t plan.<p>I remember a manager I worked with, once wrote on a whiteboard at our first project meeting:<p><i>”The #1 Feature is SHIP.”</i><p>That project was a difficult and ambitious one, with a huge amount of tension between over-structuring and over-featuring, but it did result in a shipping product that was quite good, and lasted for a number of years. It’s been decommissioned for years, but still runs today. My wife still uses it, and dreads when it will finally die.<p>The first version wasn’t what we wanted, but it grew into something a lot better.<p>I also worked on a project that was killed just before it was to ship, because it couldn’t meet spec, with all that “between done and ship” stuff.<p>To this day, I don’t know if we made the right decision, by doing that. I have never encountered any software that does what it did, anywhere near as well as it did.<p>Wasn’t my decision. I would have shipped it. I think it would have revolutionized the workflow, and set a high bar for everyone else.<p>In my experience, there’s a <i>huge</i> amount of work that has to happen, between when we declare it “done,” and when it’s ready to ship. <i>It’s important to plan for it.</i><p>It’s quite possible to overplan, but, in my experience, it’s a lot more common to underplan.<p>Here’s a metaphor that I use[0]:<p><i>Shipping is boring.<p>Ever watch a building go up? A good prefab looks complete after three months, but doesn’t open for another nine months. It looks awesome and shiny, but is still behind a rent-a-fence. What gives?<p>That’s because all that interior work; the finish carpentry, the drywall, the painting, etc., take _forever_, and these are the parts of the building that see everyday use, so they need to be absolutely spot-on. The outside is mostly a pigeon toilet. It doesn’t need to be as complete; a solid frame and watertight is sufficient. They just needed it to keep the rain out, while the really skilled craftspeople got their jobs done.<p>I like to make stuff polished, tested and complete. I don’t like making pigeon toilets.</i><p>But that’s just me. YMMV.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23220324" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=23220324</a>

If that were me, I’d have sent them an email, I’m sure they’d be happy to talk to you, just have to be a bit tight lipped about details of what you did until money changed hands.

Just ship it mantra has worked for me.<p>I created filament even when my tolerance was slightly off, I managed to label it +&#x2F;-0.03mm and sell it in market even with limited colour choice

The irony is that he still didn&#x27;t ship it !! Even when there isn&#x27;t anything to lose :(. Please do!

I shipped early, I have no customers. How do I know when to give up?

I thought this was going to be about the Boeing 737 MAX.

I loved reading your story Kitze - as you mentioned 99% :-) try to see the glass half full - always - no matter what.<p>Stay humble homie.