The First Thing We Learned In San Francisco

This is no rocket-science. This is just common sense.

We stayed too many months stuck in our garage office developing, designing and thinking about our product. We were paying attention to small details, forgetting the big picture and the pure mechanichs of the product.

What we lost during our journey is the idea that we cannot make a product that is good right now. You actually need to get feedbacks as soon as possible, and then iterate on that. Nobody has the perfect product. You need to sculpt it. So, just launch it. There is not a super user-interface? That’s fine, you will hire a great UI designer when you showed traction.

Understanding it is easy but actually doing it is different. You have to fight strong feelings associated with it :

• While you are developing your product, you are living with the feeling of “potential success”. This is a nice feeling but it doesn’t lead anywhere. You need to get out of it, QUICKLY. Stop making plans and projections. Potential is not good, face reality.
• The fear of failure : you may postpone your launch because you are afraid of failing. Let me tell you one another obvious thing : if you never fail, you can never progress. Think about a guy doing skateboarding : he can stay on his skateboard, getting around, or he can try to do “tricks”. If he does so, he is gonna fail and hurt himself. This is not easy, but by doing so, he is constantly pushing his limits and at the end, he is getting better. Get away with this idea that failure is not socially well accepted. Failure is great, this means that you are actually in a learning process.

Don’t be afraid. Take a big breath and jump. Break as fast as you can, get feedbacks, and iterate. Start with simple features and then add more. You will save time and gain experience.