In our second installment of Fucking Ship It Already, we deal with a common problem for startups: shitty products.
Look, I know that building a product with one or two engineers and no money is tough. As an entrepreneur, you almost certainly have far more ideas than you have resources to create those ideas. And it doesn’t help that you have people like me screaming, “Ship it! Ship it!” before you’re really ready.
Who could possibly blame you for shipping a product that is, frankly, kind of shitty?
I could. Knock it off.
Let’s take a step back and try to understand the difference between a shitty product and a limited product.
One big difference is that I wholly endorse shipping a limited version of your product. I think it’s stupid to ship a shitty product. But what does that mean?
A limited product is something that may not do much, but what it does, it does well. It makes it clear to the user what it does and what they should do. It solves a serious problem, or perhaps a small part of a serious problem. It doesn’t crash relentlessly. It doesn’t have enormous usability problems.
It is not half a big product. It is a small but whole product.
Most importantly, a limited product is just big enough and good enough that you can learn something important from it.
But a limited product probably doesn’t do anything else. It doesn’t have bells and whistles. It doesn’t have “nice to have” features. It may only support the problems of a small subset of the market. It may only be released to beta users.
A shitty product, on the other hand, often tries to do too many things at once, and it doesn’t do any of those things particularly well.
You really don’t want a shitty product because, when people don’t use it, you have no idea if they aren’t using it because you have a bad idea or the wrong market, or if it’s just because your users are confused and turned off by your shitty product.
Shipping a shitty product is one of the best ways to get a false negative on your idea. People will use products that aren’t “polished.” They will abandon products that are just bad.
Here’s an example - remember when Amazon only sold books? If you were around in the ‘90s, the company that now sells fifteen different versions of everything on the planet only sold actual printed books.
And they did it really well. They made it pretty easy to find books. They had a large selection of books. They shipped the books to you reliably. They had nice descriptions of the books. They improved on the bookstore experience by offering me a giant bookstore in my own home.
In other words, they did one thing - sell books online - and they did it well. It wasn’t until years later that they even branched out into selling things similar to books. And it wasn’t until they were wildly profitable (and no longer a startup) that they started adding advanced features like eReaders, cloud storage, and a marketplace where other people could sell things.
What they didn’t do was do a half assed job of trying to sell you everything immediately. They didn’t promise to sell you toasters and jewelry and smoked salmon but then fail to actually ship any of that to your house or charge you three times for the same item. They figured out how to sell things to people online with one understandable market that they could learn from.
Other examples of products that started out doing one thing really well are Instagram, Google Search, and even Facebook. Remember, Facebook started out solving a single problem on a single college campus.
Now, I’m not saying it’s easy to build a product to sell books or share photos or search the web. It’s not. It’s incredibly hard, and it’s even harder to get right.
But that’s exactly the reason why you need to dramatically limit the scope of your initial product. Even building something that seems easy is hard to do well. Imagine how hard it is to build something really big!
So, when I’m yelling at you to Fucking Ship It Already, I don’t mean that you should ship something bad. I mean that you should ship something limited - something that is small enough to be shippable and usable in a very short amount of time.
And then I mean that you should immediately improve it and ship it again. Do this over and over again as many times as you can for as long as you can.
Eventually, you’ll build the product of your dreams. It will probably be quite different from what you originally imagined, but that’s a different blog post.