Yesterday I touched upon the fact that we sat on our latest web application launch for Chatterbloc for quite some time. Whilst we were busy people elsewhere, there was always that itchy feeling that it’s not quite ready yet. We had the fear. In this article I will discuss what manifests itself as the fear, and how to push through it.

Perfection is hard to find

The sooner you realise this, the better. Scenario: You don’t release because you’re trying to find the ultimate sweet spot to avoid a backlash. Don’t bother, it’s going to be pretty difficult to achieve if you’re developing within a small team or on your own. In fact, perfection will probably never be achieved. If it was that easy, every app that came out would be a hit and we’d all be basking in each others coding glory.

You need to get to a point where your app is functional, bugs at a minimum, and pretty much does what you set out to do. Once it’s there, get it released. Let the real feedback come in and iterate through the issues. This is the only way you will ever get close to the hallowed sweet spot.

What you don’t want to do is release a pile of crap filled with bugs that instantly turn away potential users. This will turn into a big fail whale pretty sharpish, setting you up for an uphill struggle from there onwards.

Ultimately, make compromises but don’t compromise.

Haters

Like it or not, there are plenty of people out there that are more than happy to tell you how rubbish, boring, useless your application is. It doesn’t matter what I’ve released in the past, there has always been some kind of backlash from a small few. You can do nothing about this.

If we all sat and developed to mitigate every single possible negative outcome, nothing would ever get released, and nothing would progress. You really need to just get on with it, get it out there and take what’s coming to you, coz it’s coming.

Ignore the true haters that add no valuable feedback, but don’t ignore the negative feedback that is actionable. What I mean by this is, “This is rubbish!” is not valuable feedback and should not be taken to heart (unless everyone is saying it). You can’t do anything with that so move on. Feedback like “I don’t like how you’ve done this, it doesn’t make sense” etc is highlighting an actionable problem. Add it to the list, and see if it’s a common issue.

Again, you can’t make everyone happy, so acting on every whim of a user is also fruitless, even before launch. You need to grab common themes and turn them around, as these are the big pain areas.

Lovers

Whilst you would immediately think lovers don’t make up the fear, they do. Whilst you’re worrying about the negatives, you’re also panicking about the effects of a positive turn out. Will the infrastructure hold out? Will users that love our app share it with others and have we facilitated to make that happen?

Again, you could worry about this until the cows come home but you won’t achieve anything. It’s a finger in the air job when talking about capacity. Just make sure you can scale up when you need to. Be prepared.

Also, if users love your app, they will share it. Don’t over worry about having enough ways to share it to the world before launch, but make sure you monitor it and develop your app further post go live to facilitate it.

Money

Fear not, you probably won’t make buckets of cash immediately… so best not worry about that. If you’re concerned that you might not be able to afford escalating hardware costs, then you need to mitigate – get some investment, or put some cash aside.

Although not specifically something that was adding to my fear before we launched, the fear of costs escalating out of control still niggles me. You need to keep a close eye on costs against hardware/servers etc… Don’t let it daunt you.

Conclusion

It’s easier said than done, but the mantra of “release early, release often” cannot be more right. Although I like to have the caveat that you should release early ONLY when the product is functioning well enough to achieve it’s goals. Try to get over the fear of failure, even if your release dives on your first iteration, you’ve got a second chance, so use it. I hope you find this useful…

Resources to help you learn…

jQuery UI 1.6	Designing Interfaces	Learning jQuery 1.3

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 and is filed under Development, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.