[burntoutfire]

> I keep coming back to the old Reid Hoffman quote: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I also constantly remind myself that "perfect is the enemy of shipped".

Unfortunately, I believe that this philosophy is largely behind our current software being the shit it is. Seemingly basic features in absolutely fundamental softwares are broken or majorly suck (e.g. python package management, Intellisense for C++ in Visual Studio) and everyone is fine with it. One can only hope that releasing shit is the best we can reasonably accomplish and the alternative reality, where humanity takes time to release software products of reasonable quality, is just a pipe dream (because people are actually not capable of working that hard).

[simonw]

I don't think this quote is incompatible with a desire to ship high quality products.

The Reid Hoffman thing is about your initial launch. In my experience, until you've got real human beings using your thing you have absolutely no idea what it is you're even building: you could spend a full extra year working on features that no-one will ever actually use.

So getting early feedback is crucial. But that doesn't mean that, once you've figured out what people actually need, you should continue to be embarrassed by what you are building.