If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Should we release the software based product we are working on early? or should we take our time to make it perfect and then release it?

Most amateur software engineers will opt for the second approach. I know this because I was one of them. I was working on Sokrati’s first mobile app and I often used to complain that I am not getting enough time to write perfect code and design slick UIs. Then one day, our co-founder quoted Reid Hoffman - a co-founder of LinkedIn:

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

Reid Hoffman talks about Failing fast and Breaking things in this brilliant article. He asserts that an attitude of making a perfect first impression or measure twice, cut once made sense in a world ruled by gatekeepers and beholden to physics. A world where the software came on disks and shipping them was time-consuming and expensive. Hence, it was critical to make them right the first time. Today, it is possible to deploy your product with a single git push command and this new world marginalizes the cost of second impressions, third impressions, and even tenth impressions.

Hoffman further explains that the assumptions you make about your customers will not be entirely correct. In order to know whether you have made right assumptions you need a customer feedback. The sooner you launch, sooner you learn more about what your customers want and sooner you iterate. If you wait for a perfect release, you would eventually end up being embarrassed about how many wrong assumptions you made. Hoffman gives examples of PayPal and LinkedIn to delineate this phenomenon of wrong assumptions.

I have had a first-hand experience of understanding the benefits and pitfalls of releasing early. At Sokrati, I closely worked with our Co-Founder and Product Head on a product from scratch. We often released the app early and iterated many times based on customer feedback. I don’t even remember how the first version of our app looked like (Even though I was the one who developed and released it!).

Finally, Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” and software is no exception.

P.S.: Inspired by this, I launched my blog early and kept this as a first post. If there aren’t any typos in this post, I might have launched too late.