Matt Mullenweg recently posted an essay titled, 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number. If I were asked to sum the essay up in one sentence it would be, “Stop being such a perfectionist and show others what you have to offer already.” Or maybe “Break the ‘one more thing’ mentality and get the product out the door.”
Here are several things that Matt wrote that really struck a chord with me:
If you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.
Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum – if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in.
You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect…But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong.
I copied and pasted these quotes here to serve as a reminder, particularly for me. For you to fully understand the context in which Matt is speaking, I encourage you to read his entire essay.