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by eastbound 1399 days ago
“If you’re not ashamed of your first version, you shipped too late.” Reid Hoffman
1 comments

This is bullshit.

There is a big difference between:

1) Shipping low features but high quality SaaS aap: OK

2) Shipping low quality services with lots of features that are buggy: NOT OK

From a customer standpoint, I reject half-baked SaaS services that reek with lack of quality control. If you are ashamed of your first version because of bugs, stop and fix those. If you're ashamed of how minimal your first app is? That's fine. Make sure those features are high quality and work as intended.

Spoken like a developer, not a businessperson.

The real world is a lot more complicated. As Rumsfeld put it, "You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."

A startup might have a product with a promising and unique core feature, but still have many other features that are buggy. It's common for startups to be overambitious, and that often manifests as buggy features.

Startups like this will often have a high churn rate with early customers and trials. But that changes over time as they get experience with which features and which issues matter.

If you want to kill a new business quickly, "stop and fix" the bugs in your first version. The problem is, your first version may very well not be the one with the best product/market fit, and you just wasted your precious investment money, time, and resources fixing bugs that ultimately won't matter.