Launch

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

I have 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 are hiding

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

It usually looks respectable from outside. Refining spacing, going through error states, tidying the code. All of it is 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 is not 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 will watch somebody struggle with what you made and then tell you, politely, that it is very good. What matters is not what they say at the end: it is 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 do not talk.

And then nothing happens

Then comes the part almost nobody mentions: you show it and nothing happens. No enthusiasm, no rejection. 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 do not 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 is 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 is not understood. That is the easiest to fix and it is almost always in the words, not the product.

If they understand immediately and do nothing, the problem is that they do not care enough. A better interface does not fix that.

And if nobody has seen it at all, you do not 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. Curiosity explains the first visit. Only usefulness explains the second.

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

Questions people ask about this

When do I show my product for the first time?

When it can answer the question that has you stuck, even half finished and even if it embarrasses you. If you wait until you are proud of it you will have waited weeks too long and polished things nobody was going to look at.

Who do I show it to first?

People who have the problem and do not know you too well. Anybody who knows you will be kind, and you will learn nothing there. Three or four people is enough for a first round.

What do I do if I launch and nobody shows up?

Stop before touching anything and find out why. Silence from not being understood, from not mattering, and from not having been seen are three different problems with opposite solutions, and the fast reaction almost always picks the wrong one.

How many people have to use it before I know it works?

Fewer than you think. Five people coming back on their own tell you more than five hundred who arrived once from a post.