Launch

The moment comes to put it in front of somebody, and you'll never feel ready.

I've delayed it many times with reasonable excuses. The worst of them, and the one that took me longest to admit, is polishing the part that was never at risk.

The sign that you're hiding

When I catch myself improving something that already worked while the important thing is still unchecked, I know what is going on: it's not that I'm being thorough, it's that I'm protecting the idea from an answer I don't want to hear.

It usually looks respectable from outside. Refining spacing, going through error states, tidying the code. All of it's real work and all of it can be done indefinitely without getting a step closer to knowing whether anybody cares about what you made.

Showing it isn't launching it

Showing it means keeping quiet while another person uses it: no helping, no explaining, no jumping in when they get stuck. And they will get stuck.

That uncomfortable half hour teaches more than any report, because you'll watch somebody struggle with what you made and then tell you, politely, that it's very good. What matters isn't what they say at the end: it's where they stopped and what they tried before stopping.

Nothing formal is needed. Three or four people, half an hour each, and the only rule that really matters is that you don't talk.

And then nothing happens

Then comes the part almost nobody mentions: you show it and nothing happens. No enthusiasm, no rejection, just silence.

Silence resembles rejection but rarely is; to reject you they would have had to understand you first. The worst thing you can do at that point is react quickly.

Behind that silence there can be several different causes: nobody understands what it is, they understand and don't care, they care but not enough to change habit, or simply nobody has seen it. The fix each one calls for points in the opposite direction, and choosing wrong costs months.

It's worth stopping to find out which is yours before touching anything, even though stopping is exactly the opposite of what your body wants.

How I tell one cause from another

If explaining it in person changes their face, the problem is that it isn't understood. That's the easiest to fix and it's almost always in the words, not the product.

If they understand immediately and do nothing, the problem is that they don't care enough. A better interface doesn't fix that.

And if nobody has seen it at all, you don't have a product problem, you have a distribution problem, which is a different trade and worth not confusing with this one.

The only metric I believe

Of everything you can measure, the only thing that convinces me is somebody coming back a second time without being reminded. The first visit can be explained by curiosity; the second, only by usefulness.

Everything else, visits, sign ups, time on page, mostly describes how well you told the story, not how useful the thing is.

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