Day 10: Launching feels so far away

personal

Oh, boy. This morning, I started writing about how I ran some guerrilla user tests yesterday, but I stopped to drop off my friend Jake at the airport (miss you already, man!) and then spent the day hanging out with a girl that I’ve been seeing.

Now it’s past 6PM, and I don’t feel like writing the rest of that user testing post today and I also don’t really feel like diving deep into the most important tasks that I know I need to do. (Found out from the user tests yesterday that I need to make some major changes, and while I’m not thrilled to undo all the work I’ve done, I know that biting the bullet and letting go of the sunk cost will lead to a better outcome.)

Taking days off when you’re the only person working on something is a trip because you know that if you don’t do anything, then nothing will happen. It’s exhilarating having that much personal responsibility, but it can also feel overwhelming. I don’t feel quite overwhelmed right now, but there’s definitely a flavor of it because it seems like there are so many things to get done before launching Hide Feed. Maybe it’d help if I gave myself a date to shoot for and ruthlessly prioritized rather than continuing my approach of just working on things and planning to launch whenever things are ready.

I’ll start by dividing up the pieces that are truly required before launch and which ones would be nice to have.

Required:

  • …maybe nothing?

I originally listed “support for billing and licenses”, but even that can wait if needed. The product itself is ready for public use at this point — it’s just that I want to have support for the paid plan in place for when I launch. Let’s try this again, with the assumption that support for the paid plan needs to exist upon launch:

Required:

  • Website

    • Billing integration

  • Extension

    • Provide trial of premium features for first X days
    • Validate licenses to unlock premium features
    • Add upgrade flows

Nice-to-have:

  • Website

    • Clearer examples
    • Add references to existing research on social network use and decision fatigue
    • Move pricing to separate page
    • A bunch more things that I discovered during user testing that I’ll talk about in a future post

  • Extension

    • Ability to add your own images instead of using Unsplash images
    • Better onboarding

There’s a part of me that’s saying that I should try to launch ASAP and that I can make all of these changes incrementally once it’s already out in the wild. But the main benefit of launching early is to collect feedback early. But I’m already doing that with the beta testers I have and with the user tests that I’ve been running.

The answer seems clearly to be in between “launch now even though you know you have major usability issues” and “fix all the things and get it 100% perfect before launching”. The tricky part is figuring out the balance between the two.

I’m feeling pretty tired so I’ll just work on some tiny tasks for now and tackle the big ones tomorrow when I’m recharged.