Forever last few days before launching

[aktively]

Sometimes it feels there are endless days before launching an update or a new version of the product: FAQ not done yet or homepage background color code is off, etc. Yeah, just ship it. I know. You know.

Have you been there? How were your "last" few days before launching the product?

[justinraczak]

I've been in the last few days of my project, Crowdscore, for...longer than I care to disclose. At times it's been agonizing. We seemed to be spinning around on seemingly inconsequential details. And while it flies in the face of the era of 'fuck it, ship it', in retrospect I can live happily with the delays we've faced. All our squabbling over why this feature was better than the thing that competitor does and why this interface would be more valuable to users ultimately caused tiny shifts in our strategy. Now looking back in retrospect at what we planned to ship and what we'll ship, we've designed and built something we're more proud of and more confident in because we sweated the small stuff. We chased down answers to all of our "what if"s. While we shipped a little later, we have the one-liner answers to the questions like "how is this different" and "why do users want this?"

This is a little different than delaying on background colors, but this has been my experience.

[aktively]

I love what you said about "sweated the small stuff." Our product Aktively is marketplace that serves the creative community like artisans, artists, makers, etc., who are more picky about visual details such as pixels, user friendly tips, margins... We released an alpha version back in January. The good thing was it attracted a few hundreds of adopters. The "bad" thing was people felt we needed to enhance here and there to make the product less suspicious. lol. That's when I realized MVP means different levels in different contexts.