[andyhin]

Matt,

You need to launch - now. I was in a similar position a few years ago with one of my first startups. We spent months on development even though we had a usable product done very quickly. We analyzed our competitors, and constantly tried to one-up them while hiding in stealth mode. We were never completely happy with the product, as it seemed to always be missing some feature. Feature creep hit, and we spent another few months developing.

This proved to be a big mistake. The problem here is that we tried to predict how our users would use our product, wasting tons of time developing features we thought potential users would like (we didn't have any actual users at this point). This took our product in the wrong direction - when we launched it seemed users didn't use it the way we intended - most of the features were never used.

In hindsight, instead of spending time predicting and implementing features that would never be used, we should have just launched the product and evolved the way users ACTUALLY use it.

[mattbell]

Thanks for sharing this with me, it's very helpful. We have a lot of guessing going on, and you're right; we should wait to see how users will want to use the site and get feedback before building stuff people might not care about. Cheers!