Fucking Ship It Already: Just Not to Everyone At Once

There is a pretty common fear that people have. They’re concerned that if they ship something that isn’t ready, they’ll get hammered and lose all their customers. Startups who have spent many painstaking months acquiring a small group of loyal customers are hesitant to lose those customers by shipping something bad.

I get it. It’s scary. Sorry, cupcake. Do it anyway.

First, your early adopters tend to be much more forgiving of a few misfires. They’re used to it. They’re early adopters. Yours is likely not the first product they’ve adopted early. If you’re feeling uncomfortable, go to the Way Back Machine and look at some first versions of products you use every day. When your eyes stop bleeding, come back and finish this post. I’ll wait.

Still nervous? That’s ok. The lucky thing is that you don’t have to ship your ridiculous first draft of a feature to absolutely everybody at once. Let’s look at a few strategies you can use to reduce the risk.

The Interactive Mockup

A prototype is the lowest risk way you can get your big change, new feature, or possible pivot in front of real users without ruining your existing product. And you’d be surprised at how often it helps you find easy to fix problems before you ever write a line of “real code.”

If you don’t want to build an entire interactive prototype, trying showing mockups, sketches, or wireframes of what you’re considering. The trick is that you have to show it to your real, current users.

Get on a screen share with some users and let them poke around the prototype. Whatever you do, never tell them why you made the changes or what the feature is supposed to be for or how awesome it is. You want the experience to be as close as possible to what it would be if you just released the feature into the wild and let the users discover it for themselves.

If your product involves any sort of user generated content, taking the time to include some of the tester’s own content can be extremely helpful. For example, if it’s a marketplace where you can buy and sell handmade stuff, having the user’s own items can make a mockup seem more familiar and orient the user more quickly.

Of course, if there’s sensitive financial data or anything private, make sure to get the user’s permission BEFORE you include that info in their interactive prototype. Otherwise, it’s just creepy.

The Opt In

Another method that works well is the Opt In. While early adopters tend to be somewhat forgiving of changes or new features, people who opt in to those changes are even more so.

Allowing people to opt in to new features means that you have a whole group of people who are not only accepting of change but actively seeking it out. That’s great for getting very early feedback while avoiding the occasional freakout from the small percentage of people who just enjoy screaming, “Things were better before!”

Here’s a fun thing you can learn from your opt in group: If people who explicitly ask to see your new feature hate your new feature, your new feature probably sucks.

The Opt Out

Of course, you don’t only want to test your new features or changes with people who are excited about change. You also want to test them with people who hate change, since they’re the ones who are going to scream loudest.

Once you’re pretty sure that your feature doesn’t suck, you can share it with more people. Just make sure to let them go back to the old way, and then measure the number of people who actually do switch back.

Is it a very vocal 1% that is voting with their opt out? You’re probably ok. Is half of your user base switching back in disgust? You may not have nailed that whole “making it not suck” thing.

The n% Rollout

Even with an opt out, if you’ve got a big enough user base, you can still limit the percentage of users who see the change. In fact, you really should be split testing this thing 50/50, but if you want to start with just 10% to make sure that you don’t have any major surprises, that’s a totally reasonable thing to do.

When you roll a new feature out to a small percentage of your users, just make sure that you know what sorts of things you’re looking for. This is a great strategy for seeing if your servers are going to keel over, for example.

It’s also nice for seeing if that small, randomly selected cohort behaves any differently from the group that doesn’t have the new feature. Is that cohort more likely to make a purchase? Are they more likely to set fire to their computers and swear never to use your terrible product ever again? These are both good things to know.

Do remember, however, that people on the internet talk about things. Kind of a lot. If you have any way at all for your users to be in contact with one another, people will find out that their friends are seeing something different. This can work for or against you. Just figure out who’s whining the loudest about being jealous of the other group, and you’ll know whether to continue the rollout. What you want to hear is, “Why don’t I have New New New New New Thing, yet?” and not “Just be thankful that they haven’t forced the hideous abomination on you. Then you will have to set your computer on fire.”

The New User Rollout

Of course, if you’re absolutely terrified of your current user base (and you’d be surprised at how many startups seem to be), you can always release the change only to new users.

This is nice, because you get two completely fresh cohorts where the only difference is whether or not they’ve seen the change. It’s a great way to do A/B testing.

On the other hand, if it’s something that’s supposed to improve things for retained users or users with lots of data, it can take a really long time to get enough information from this. After all, you need those new cohorts to turn into retained users before seeing any actual results, and that can take months.

Also, whether or not new users love your changes doesn’t always predict whether your old users will complain. Your power users may have invested a lot of time and energy into setting up your product just the way they want it, and making major changes that are better for new folks doesn’t always make them very happy.

In the end, you need to make the decision whether you’ll have enough happy new users to offset the possibly angry old ones. But you’ll probably need to make that decision about a million more times in the life of your startup, so get used to it.

So, are you ready to fucking ship it, already? Yes. Yes, you are. Just don't ship it to everybody all it once.

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