The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever (2020)

https://www.kitze.io/posts/saddest-just-ship-it-story-ever

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

266 300 2 years ago

schobi• 2 years ago

It sucks to realize that someone else beat you to a proper release. Happened in my last job, we went though the stages of grief just as the author here.

In the end you learned a lot about new technology, about your pace of development, about you thinking, about aspects you like and don't like. The lessons learned "ship it" prepares for next time.

lukan2• 2 years ago

On the other hand, there is no second try, to make a first impression. And the first impression lasts a while. So at least get some feedback before "just shipping". Otherwise reactions might be "doesn't work" - because what was obviously a start button for you making it, was not so obvious for someone just stumbling over it.

tass• 2 years ago

It doesn’t need to be shipped to the public. He shared videos with people, and those same people can be the first users of the MVP.

The point of an MVP is to elicit feedback, know you’re on the right track to build something useful, and iterate.

lukan2• 2 years ago

"It doesn’t need to be shipped to the public"

Ok, I took it by the usual meaning of ship it to the market. Not having people test it.

jascha_eng2• 2 years ago

I wholeheartedly agree with this, when I started working on Kviklet we were a team of 3 and one of us was a lot more perfectionist than the others. It took a lot of convincing to even put our (tbf shitty) first website version up. Much more to release our repo. We lost that "co-founder" early on, but man I'm glad we released early and tried to sell.

It didn't work and we found no buyers but imagine we still were working on a product without knowing if anyone would ever want to pay for it, keeping our hopes up in the dark.

By now we went with the backup plan and open sourced and have a few cool users. Could maybe even say it's a small community: https://github.com/kviklet/kviklet

It's not the startup success story that I hoped for a year ago. But it's a lot better than still hoping for it and not being a bit more grounded. Also open-source doesn't mean I can never sell support or a premium version and still make a few bucks right? For now it's just a fun side project though.

382• 2 years ago

Pull Request-like Review/Approval flow for database queries

Terrible description IMO. a query should not need approval. Should use mutation or edit or update or modification. Even if query is technically correct it just sounds wrong and confusing.

loa_in_• 2 years ago

You say it's confusing, but it's exactly what I expected it to be based on the description

jascha_eng2• 2 years ago

I'm not quite sure what you mean. Maybe statement instead of query would be more accurate but I think people get the gist of it just fine.

Also, I disagree a manual query like: "select * from credit_cards;" should probably go through an approval flow if you have a table like that in your prod env.

pjc503• 2 years ago

No, that's just what everyone calls SQL statements. It's fine.

I like this idea. It sits between "developers have access to prod" (no! bad idea!) and requiring everything to be signed in triplicate. It provides a low-friction way to make reviewable changes to prod.

firefoxd• 2 years ago

I started mine in 2017, after I left the start up i co-founded. 2 months later, the app was. I still haven't posted a show hn.

In fact, after 2 years, someone approached me saying he is building the exact same product, but in Germany. We had several zoom calls. He shipped it, failed and iterated. I'm just watching him and hoping someday I get some time to actually do something with mine.

ggeorgovassilis6• 2 years ago

so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem

I once met a guy who had a good idea about an app, something that became fairly mainstream two years later. He asked me to code the app for free and we'd share revenues. When asked what his contribution would be, he offered to "run" the company and otherwise his 50% was "having the idea". I thanked him and told him that he has a head-start of 6 months, if his app hasn't hit the market by then, I'd write the thing myself.

deadbabe• 2 years ago

Not sure if it’s smart to do that if you aren’t entirely sure about what mental state a person could be in.

Edit: okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted for this but if you think you can just tell someone you’re going to steal their awesome idea in 6 months you better hope their not the type of “crazy” entrepreneur who will cause problems for you or in extreme cases even end up shooting you in the back of the head.

ggeorgovassilis6• 2 years ago

okay I don’t know why I’m getting downvoted

Because saying "don't do something because an irrational player might irrationally punish you for that" isn't particularly insightful. To expand on your argument, I could find out your real identity (this is hacker news, so I might be a hacker) and pay you a visit (I won't, I'm too lazy & incompetent for that). Just saying that your argument doesn't make sense to me.

you’re going to steal their awesome idea

I paid for it by listening to a bad sales pitch, that's 40 minutes of my life I'm never getting back. Also, there was no confidentiality or non-compete agreement.

end up shooting you in the back of the head

Only a semi-related tangent, I live in Europe, people here usually don't carry guns which shifts the entire risk/reward calculation significantly.

pjc503• 2 years ago

You never know when you're going to get hit by a car either. Or a meteorite.

It's a tempting trap to make decisions - or even worse, paralyze decisions - around the rare outcomes, rather than the common ones.

saulpw• 2 years ago

I mean handling sales + marketing + accounting and everything else required to run a company is worth 50% (maybe more). But of course while you were probably competent enough to "code it up", odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company".

laborcontract2• 2 years ago

i’ve recently had a revelatory experience with my cofounder, who is focused entirely on sales. we were pitching our product/services to the company execs- and he just owned the room. He definitely oversold, hallucinated a little bit, said some (many) things i never would have said, but he didn’t lie. I have a highly diminished opinion of my talents than compared to reality and i know it. And i can’t fix it, i’ve tried.

In that meeting, there are times i wanted to interject to add some context, they very skillfully pulled me away from talking too much and qualifying everything.

We got our first sale. Big client, big company, very important sale.

Came out of that meeting daze because that’s when i internalized it - im worth no more than half the company. It was truly revelatory. I’m writing all the code, all the “hard” work is on me. I dont care.

Before that, i spent two years on my own project with zero traction because i didn’t even want to sell it, i just wanted to make it better. by the end i was gasping for air.

If you can find a good decent person who has a great network and a knack for sales (and is fine doing administrative work) by god, let go of your ego and give them room to cook and have faith in yourself to ship.

I spent the first half of my career deriding and diminishing the effort of salespeople. Never again.

dgb23• 2 years ago

Administrative work should probably not exceed 10% of the budget, especially in a small company, where the advantage is to have less requirements in that area.

Marketing and sales, it depends on what you sell to whom. Let’s say 10-20%.

Then there’s a grey area. Obviously there needs to be a feedback loop between clients, development and business. If the business/idea guy facilitates a lot of this and is mostly responsible to maintain the relationships, then he is part of development. So another 10-20% give or take.

That 50% number seems kind of fair. Ultimately it implies that both are putting in the same time and effort.

If the business guy is getting overwhelmed, the developer guy can automate things, talk to clients, write pretty documents for clients or take on some admin tasks.

If the developer guy is overwhelmed then the business guy can simplify requirements negotiate deadlines, do manual testing and feedback, organize tasks and so on.

What I‘m trying to say is that 50% might be more of a social contract rather than an a priori, objective assessment of value.

ggeorgovassilis6• 2 years ago

odds are he wasn't competent to "run the company"

A 2 people company where neither gets paid and "product development" consists of me coding the MPV, fronting all the work and the risk.

silisili2• 2 years ago

As someone extremely logic and programming oriented, I -wish- I'd met someone like that. I'm just not an idea guy, apparently.

If the idea was truly good so much so you believed in it, it was a heck of an offer tbh.

light_triad• 2 years ago

The problem with this setup is that having the idea is only the starting point. You will need to iterate, talk to customers, improve the solution for years while you learn more about the market.

Even if the idea is truly good all the value is in the execution and acting on non obvious information from your customers. Anyone who isn’t committed to this long and uncertain process probably shouldn’t be a co-founder.

raincole2• 2 years ago

If the idea was truly good so much so you believed in it, it was a heck of an offer tbh.

Perhaps. But in the past 15 years I've never seen such a good idea.

If one is going to take 50% I'd expect them to be a really good salesman at least.

jaggederest4• 2 years ago

I'll give you any one of 3 or 4 ideas right now, if you want them. They're ideas I'd develop if I had the time, energy and brainpower. I've got personal connections for you too, if you want them, people who need the product. I won't even ask 50%, heck, 5% sounds fine by me.

My experience has been that, while that is useful, it's by no means sufficient to lead to a complete and useful tool. But I'd absolutely take that deal any day of the week, from the "idea" side of the fence. Imagine if you did it 20 times - quite a nice portfolio.

protocolture6• 2 years ago

I was once involved in an indie game project. We had a middling idea for a crappy game but we were all hankering for software development experience in that field.

Of the 3 of us who set about coding it, 2 of us just sat down and started blocking the thing out. The third, pushed faulty code to the SVN, created a design document crediting the entire idea to himself, and then called a meeting telling us he is the game designer and he would sue us if we made the game elsewhere. The 2 of us actually contributing just looked at each other and dropped the whole thing. He basically played his cards face up and we got to see he was a pissant.

Later I did see someone with the same general idea on steam. Good for them honestly. If they came up with the idea separately, great. If they stole it from the loser, also great. If they managed to persevere under him they deserve some coin.

999900000999• 2 years ago

Depends on your target audience.

I have a side project that's just an internal tool for my music visualizer/ lyric video generator.

It has no functional sign up for new users and is very difficult to use. It's "shipped" as in I use it for my projects.

Another is a simple web app a friend requested. He uses it occasionally. I'm sure y'all on HN could probably find half a dozen issues with it. But it's what my friend wanted and I learned a lot.

The moral of the story is use Flutter from the start, don't worry about shipping apps( do you really want to struggle with the various app stores for what's just a web app anyway), and ship early and often.

adastra222• 2 years ago

Why not ship now? Well not now in 2024, but when this article was written?

Most apps and services you use were not first to market.

thekitze11• 2 years ago

I did! 2 years ago I launched Benji (https://benji.so) (but rewrote it from scratch this time)

adastra222• 2 years ago

Nice! Thanks for the update!

victorstanciu• 2 years ago

Even though they were working on it for the past few years it's still slow, buggy, and super unpolished, it doesn't matter, because they shipped.
Their mobile app is terrible and it needs 10 seconds to sync. It doesn't matter, they shipped. And I'm looking forward to every single update they release.
Their backlog of things to do is huge, but it doesn't matter, they ship every single week, and the app is growing along with the community.

Sigh. I agree, and I can empathize, but as a user I am so sick and tired of half-finished crap being shoved out the door just to beat the competition to the starting line. Every day the software we use becomes slower, more bloated, and less stable, and part of it is exactly this attitude of throwing crap at the wall and hoping it sticks. And the sad part is, since everyone is doing it, you can't really not do it, otherwise--as the author discovered--you get left in the dust.

tithe• 2 years ago

I've always thought that hanging a "beta" on a logo isn't an excuse to ship junk, but as you allude to, sometimes product and service quality isn't the priority.

I'm also reminded of Dave McClure's talk [0]: "Don't do your viral marketing campaign until your product doesn't suck! Because what will happen is people will tell other people that your product sucks! ...So don't do that!"

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjgfW0BIrw

ajaymenon0• 2 years ago

Yeah I so agree. Specially post the AI boom, there's just this intrinsic itch I see of taking a product that queries chatGPT and slaps an AI label on it to make it a product. (I'm look at you Rabbit R1).

I do understand that it does foster some air of competition and hence there's a the capitalistic push of doing better than the other person. But then, a lot of sub standard software leaks through which shifts the whole benchmark for acceptable user experience.

theideaofcoffee• 2 years ago

I feel this deep in my bones. I worked on <some project> a long while back because I wanted to scratch an itch, and I thought that some of the problems I was seeing, hey, maybe someone else was having them too. So I start kinda-sorta-half-heartedly exploring the idea, writing some pilot code, then I discovered hacker news. And oh boy did people have things to say about the general problem, it's impossible to solve, no one should waste their time, we can just <do the drop box thing and wire up ninety five things and make it shamble along>, definitely no need to waste time trying to implement something new from scratch.

Then I dropped it, because, hey, the glitterati of hacker news and all of the others must be right, huh? I let it wither, while working on other things, working for other people, making them wealthier, while all in the back of my mind I keep thinking: "maybe I should keep working on it."

Services doing the same exact thing started popping up. They get traction. Users are mostly happy with what they were doing, but they didn't have half of the features that I had already implemented in the code that hadn't seen any use outside of my testing environment. Some take off so well they have a now-publicly traded company doing the same thing. Ten years after I started my little project.

Fuck.

Lesson learned. The naivete of youth is a harsh teacher. Work on it. Put more effort into it. Ship it. Go with your gut--you probably have a better sense than you think you do of what will work and what won't. Ignore the hivemind. Don't leave room for the regret you will inevitably feel when you're scooped.

zogrodea5• 2 years ago

I'm sorry that happened to you. The comments here are generally high quality and I've learned quite a lot from them, but there are things I've learned from experience that go against conventional wisdom here.

Although not as drastic a case as yours, I think it's often worth being critical of what one reads here and keeping one's ideals until actual experience makes one incline one way or the other.

worthless-trash2• 2 years ago

I would say if you take hacker news advice about what works, you're a bit of a fool. HN readers are in the pool of people who would be your competition.

jezek23• 2 years ago

Actually it is not that bad. New ideas often require a significant push so people not only get comfortable with it but also start to demand it. Having someone else bigger to do this hard work opens an actual market for it that you can now enter.

You don't need to be first or second, esp. if you're a small player. You can still win some market share over time (and it doesn't need to be small compared to what you would achieve if you would be first as the market is now bigger). Make it helpful to people who find the established solutions lacking on features or workflows that could be better.

In other words, when is it the right time to ship? With a good product, at any time. Does it matter that there are already multiple established players? Not really, you can always come up with a better version.

Culonavirus3• 2 years ago

There's massive caveat with all of these "and then the story ends because we didn't just ship it :(" stories: sometimes the value of the "app" you're working on is in the technical details that cannot really be "hastened" and you can't "just ship it".

Also, and this is something a lot of the managerial class people don't want to hear:

Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible. So unless you own what you're coding and you really need it out of the door for your own benefit, if more time makes your work more professional, then take more time. Anyone telling you otherwise is a 100% hack. You are not an automaton that takes in JIRA tickets and spits out hacky code as soon as possible. Or at least you shouldn't be. Not to mention that not taking time (doing things properly) is incredibly taxing on your psyche and you WILL burn out. There are only so much garbage tasks you can take.

It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software. What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad. This is the thing that will ultimately make you feel good about the work you're doing. Hitting that arbitrary deadline for a 1425474th time may feel like a relief but it's short term and a form of negative motivation - and in the workplace, those NEVER work over a long period of time. So RESIST that pressure from the top and do your work properly. If they fire you, then who cares, the only way up these days is job hopping anyways.

treve3• 2 years ago

This entire comment reads as someone who has a purely adversarial relationship with their coworkers with little trust. Sounds exhausting!

manmal3• 2 years ago

Seeing you‘re a CTO, I‘m a bit concerned for your staff (if any) if your first reflex is blaming the developer for not trusting their boss.

zogrodea5• 2 years ago

It reminded me of that quote wrongly attributed to Shigeru Miyamoto (who created Mario and Zelda and other classic games). "A rushed game is bad forever, but a delayed one may eventually be good."

Of course it may not apply to software today (except to the extent first impressions count) because modern software tends to be continuously maintained (and modern games often are too, to a much lesser degree, with post-release patches).

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

I can see some of the tone being too adversarial, but I think the gist, that we are after all professional engineers, who studied and spent time and money to understand how to build such systems to high standards.

And since we are that and are paid for that knowledge, we should strive to improve software / system quality as much as possible. Isn't the job of executives, managers, etc. to figure out the constraints we have and strive to improve profit and shipping speed as much as possible?

Together, with our combined expertise we can get the practical best of all three. But if eng just nod along knowing they are sacrificing quality, security, scalability, etc. then they are doing a disservice to the team, no?

yamumsahoe• 2 years ago

no, to me it doesnt.

to me he's right about how devs should deliver it as engineeringly sound as possible, and executives should deliver it as timely as possible.

its a balance between having a usable product and a product they need at the right time.

it's not adversarial. its a conflict yes, but a healthy one.

Culonavirus3• 2 years ago

Sounds exhausting? Sounds like gaslighting a wee bit...

Oh nooo... the poor managers, how will they manage if you don't TRUST them blindly and completely (and bend over backwards to fulfill all their whims)? What kind of a cult is this? I'm not a sheep that needs to be herded. Besides, trust is earned.

So no, it's not exhausting, it's the exact opposite. It's refreshing and freeing.

Anyways, I get along with my coworkers very well. In fact most of my friends began as my coworkers. Then again I do not consider managers to be my coworkers. And generally speaking, yes, you could say I don't trust them. But that just comes from working in 5 for-profit companies for over 15 years. The only exception was an energy company, probably because the "just ship it" mentality wasn't as strong.

jampekka2• 2 years ago

Or with the employer/owners? Owners and workers have a fundamentally adversarial relationship.

eastbound2• 2 years ago

Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible.

Wow. That reminds me of what the guy who was fired said.

I’ll never understand him. He lives in a house that’s below sea level, with one kid and one wife, and it gets flooded every 4 years. He was raised 30% during Covid, job was quite comfortable, he was competent for it, then stopped pulling his weight. Wouldn’t it be easier to keep pulling weight and try to build something that works, rather than deploying energy for union tactics, and then live in a twice-more expensive above-sea-level house?

Yes it would. Sometimes people get stuck in a victimization loop.

polotics• 2 years ago

Good News: Dr Sapolsky has recently updated his intro video on depression.

it's here: https://youtu.be/fzUXcBTQXKM?si=JU-iOaP9SeFdB5qy

pdonis5• 2 years ago

Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be.

Maybe. But...

Your job is to create great software.

No. Your job is to do what the company pays you for. The company is not paying you to create great software. It's paying you to solve some kind of business problem or provide some kind of business service. Some of those problems or services do indeed require great software. But many do not; mediocre software will do the job just fine. And if that's the case, and you insist on creating great software anyway, you are spending time and effort that is not adding anything to the company's bottom line. And while you personally might not care about that, the company does, and they're paying you.

What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad.

You used the term "software engineer". A software engineer's job is not to always write great software. It's to write the optimal amount and quality of software for meeting the particular requirement it's supposed to meet. More generally, an engineer's job is to produce optimal solutions to problems. That does not always mean building the highest quality product possible. Sometimes it means doing just enough to get the job done, even if it's not very pretty, and stopping there because doing more would add no business value. And you should not at all feel bad about putting that on your resume. Refusing the temptation to gold plate everything when it's not necessary is a good thing for an engineer.

aprilthird20214• 2 years ago

No. Your job is to do what the company pays you for. The company is not paying you to create great software. It's paying you to solve some kind of business problem or provide some kind of business service.

The company pays me because of my knowledge and expertise, that is needed to create and maintain the porduct as best as possible.

If I am just a yes man, the company isn't getting what they paid for. If I honestly assess and say what is being sacrificed re: security, scalability, future flexibility, etc. in the software, then the company is getting what they paid for, and they can choose how far they want to go in the quality / time spectrum. And if they pick somewhere my expertise says is too far on one or the other side, it's my job to say so.

No?

protocolture6• 2 years ago

No. Your job is to do what the company pays you for.

Yes and no. Ultimately, your solution will live on after you. Even if theres no way for it to backfire publicly, your coworkers and future employees have to deal with it. It can absolutely ruin your reputation and cost you future employment. Admittedly its much easier for a contractor to draw a red line, but I had done this as far back as my first full time IT job, setting boundaries with the owner of that business as to what is and is not practical and achievable.

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW• 2 years ago

Your job is to do what the company pays you for.

The problem with this mindset is the most companies are short-sighted and when the problems inevitably start coming in it is the developers who are placed under pressure.

It is the developer being paged at 2am on a Sunday. It is the developer working overtime to get the feature out because the codebase is a giant mess. Etc.

Having a minimum quality bar is a must. The OP was suggesting a professional level of quality - not gold plating everything.

bruce511• 2 years ago

I started writing a reply about how the context is very different between indie side projects and your work environment, but then your post morphed into a comment about the role of a programmer in an organisation, and so did my reply.

Firstly, I sense you are frustrated in your current post and I sense you are not in step with your management or perhaps not even in step with your coworkers. I sympathize with your predicament. If I had any advice it's that you cast around for a position that's more in line with your principles and goals (don't quit your current job till you find that.)

Personally I've been on all sides in the myself. I've been the principled programmer. I've been the one dedicated to quality. I've been the manager. I've been the person responsible for the business staying in business.

Yeah its nice to adopt the "code my problem, business not" position. It seems like the moral high ground. But businesses are all about balance. They have to balance things like income, and happy customers with tech debt and so on. Having programmers (or anyone for that matter) working -against- the big picture is not ultimately useful and can do more harm than good.

I don't always agree with my team and they often don't agree with me. But ultimately I'm responsible so (sometimes tough) decisions have to be made. The most successful employees are those who acknowledge that this isn't necessarily the best way to do something, but strive anyway to make it a success.

I wish I had the time and money to let programmers just spend forever building stuff and never shipping. They most definitely wish that. But we live in a real world with constraints and the reality is we need a lot more than perfect code.

Of course some places are just impossible to work at, where everything is rushed and there is no balance either. And then it sucks to be you.

eastbound2• 2 years ago

If we waste resources overengineering everything, it takes resources away from other parts of society that require them.

pdimitar19• 2 years ago

Yeah its nice to adopt the "code my problem, business not" position. It seems like the moral high ground.

What? No.

It's the economically and humanly well-balanced position. I got a wife whom I love to spend time with and I don't want to live on the computer. 8 hours is already way too much. I do what is expected of me and maybe a little more, for the rest they'll have to pay extra or give me parts of the profit.

If not, they'll get baseline performance.

It is always so mind-bendingly odd to watch people claim that you can go above and beyond as if that has zero side effects on any other aspects of your life.

shalmanese4• 2 years ago

This is the wrong framing of it, shipping is an internal mental battle, not an external one.

We are not perfectly rational automatons that always work towards our rational best interests. Shipping is hard so we create mental battles inside ourselves to avoid it and use post-hoc justifications to feel morally ok with that decision.

The choice of when to ship isn't nearly as important as the answer to why you aren't shipping on the choice you said you would ship. Yes, shipping at different points of maturity represent different sets of tradeoffs in a complex multi-dimensional matrix and it's an intellectually fascinating challenge but often, the choice is far less important than the debate that sucks it in and engineers end up bikeshedding the decision. Whenever you find yourself bikeshedding, it's important to realize you don't solve it by looking at the decision but by looking at why people feel the need to bikeshed in the first place.

You talk about how "Your job is to create great software. What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad.", what is the "job to be done" by that belief for you? Is this a true, genuine held belief by you or is that here as a cover to some deeper belief that is uncomfortable to surface?

The answer is something ultimately only you can answer and no internet comment can force that deep degree of introspection, only those close to you who have a requisite degree of insight and therapeutic practice can reliably help with that. But the larger point I want to make is that the shape of the conversation around shipping is all around exploring where we feel different mental resistance around shipping at any point in time and uncovering where that resistance truly comes from vs the reasons we make up to dress it up.

Fr0styMatt88• 2 years ago

What do you mean by “not shipping on the choice you made to ship”? Do you have an example?

Really fascinating thoughts.

mirsadm• 2 years ago

Most deadlines are made up anyway. If it doesn't happen usually nothing happens.

achenet7• 2 years ago

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” - Douglas Adams

rkuodys• 2 years ago

I think it's very different when you're one-man-show vs a cogwheel in organisation. In former case, just like the author mentioned, your struggle is more with yourself. You need to make yourself move forward. And "Just ship it" approach gives you that - you get external push to carry on. External user(s), external comments and demands give you that bit of energy to carry on.

In corporation setup, you always have a manager and peers that push you. You have periodic meetings with team/manager whatever to show what you have done, and then, depending on company setup, it's quality vs speed discussion. But that's very different from being all alone with your code and computer trying to build something from the grou up.

riwsky• 2 years ago

Engineering is tradeoffs; the whole concept of quality only makes sense in the context of a certain budget. If an engineer takes two weeks hand-crafting some one-off charts in d3 and react that could’ve been done uglier in some BI dashboard in a day, it might look good on a résumé—but it’s shitty engineering.

vouwfietsman3• 2 years ago

It's worth repeating: Unless you have a stake in the company, it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software

This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

The thing is though, that profitable is not the same as "just ship it". If you're in a company where those things are conflated frequently, that's a sign of lack of seniority in management.

Your job is to create great software

It really isn't, your job is to make a great product. Making a great product often, but not always, requires great software. Many great products have terrible software behind them. The tension between product, sales and development should result in a compromise that creates the most value short, middle and long term. It is 100% your job as a developer to understand what can and cannot be hacked, what priorities the company has beside delivering great software, and finally: when great software must be made, because compromise is unwise.

Just like the boy who cried wolf, the developer who can never compromise on software quality is powerless when there is an actual reason to not compromise on software quality, and rightfully so.

katzenversteher• 2 years ago

> Your job is to create great software
It really isn't, your job is to make a great product. Making a great product often, but not always, requires great software.

I believe that depends on the role you have. If you're a software engineer I think you should try to create great software. If you're responsible for the product you can decide it might be better for the product to ship earlier or with the current state of software but I think you should not keep your software engineers from trying to make the software great. You can try to shift their focus on a different (software) topic that you think is more important if you don't like what they are currently trying to improve.

dclowd9901• 2 years ago

I 100% agree with you. I’m in a situation at the moment when I’m nearly constantly having to check myself against other devs. I don’t do hacky work and nothing I do isn’t extensible or easily refactorable. But I constantly get feedback from another dev on my team wanting me to polish out a change to perfection against every feasible possibility. I try to employ YAGNI reasoning to them, but they just have a perfectionist standard.

Look: job 1 is making safe software, job 2 is making money and job 3 is perfecting the architecture.

fabioborellini6• 2 years ago

This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

Developers aren't compensated for any extraordinary achievement, though. Unless they own a notable share of the company. So, why should they give everything and get nothing back? How is that fair?

Salespeople and managers usually consider technical guys pariah. They can always be outsourced or otherwise replaced, and they can be blamed, for example for failing to meet impossible targets. If there's success, it always is a manager's achievement.

Developers also get roughly the same pay for both working minimum and for screwing their lives and healths on powerpoint-driven death marches. The compensation for extraordinary success goes to shareholders, and maybe managers or even salespeople.

starfallg• 2 years ago

It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

To generalise this, it's everyone's job to create value. This may or may not result in profit, but ultimately aligns with the goals of the organisation.

jampekka2• 2 years ago

Making a great product and maximizing profitability are often at odds. E.g. see all those dark patterns.

Culonavirus3• 2 years ago

absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable

Absolutely and categorically it is not. That is complete nonsense. Why should an employee care? Unless there's some profit sharing scheme in place that would benefit the said employee and they took advantage of that scheme. And even then, employees typically (and I'd even say in the vast majority of cases) have very few and tiny levers to pull to affect company profitability. So you typically you get nothing if the profit is x and nothing if the profit is x+n and even if you get some of that n you can't really affect the absolute value of n. Why should you care about n again? Oh, right, so the company doesn't go under and/or lays you off. That shit may have worked 20-30 years ago when company loyalty and upwards mobility was a thing.

It really isn't, your job is to make a great product.

Nope, that's the product manager's job. Here, a Wikipedia link, just for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Product_manager

incanus77• 2 years ago

It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

Common misconception, but a non-profit needs to make a profit, too. It just gets invested back into the business instead of distributed to shareholders, or in fact to any individuals.

Earw0rm• 2 years ago

It's more contextual than that.

In some cases, ship vs not ship, profit vs not profit, is the difference between a company thriving and failing to thrive.

In others, there are second- or third-order effects that render marginal profitability kind of irrelevant to the trajectory. This usually applies to either very large / institutional orgs, or situations where the business is leveraged by investors (VC or PE) such that the kind of honest profit earned by shipping an update or a new product won't meaningfully impact on the company's fate. In those situations, doing good engineering and cleaning up tech debt might make more difference to yours and your colleagues' lives, and maybe even your customers', than shipping.

epicureanideal• 2 years ago

It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

This attitude is more likely to get you fired than rewarded in most companies.

If you step outside your role, or even lift your head up and peek around and offer your thoughts about what you see, you'll be at greater risk for no reward.

Again, in most companies, not all.

snozolli4• 2 years ago

Many great products have terrible software behind them.

Please give some examples of great products created by software developers that have terrible software behind them.

ruszki• 2 years ago

Personally, I’ve never seen good developers who cared at all about profitability. All of them cared about the products and customers, but no one was driven by profit at all. Whom I met and cared about profit, they were mediocre the best.

matrix87• 2 years ago

This is a terrible take, and one I generally see as a signal of lack of seniority in a software dev. It is absolutely everybody's job in the company to make sure it is profitable, unless you work for a non-profit.

There's a third and even more common option: seniors who really could care less about either

Who do you think is more likely to be lying? The person who claims to care about the bottom line or the person who claims to care about code quality? From my experience the former is almost always a bullshitter

antupis• 2 years ago

The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad.

Usually when you are doing "just ship it" often enough you achieve this, especially at larger firms too often I see situations where engineers are doing their 3th refactoring without any customer feedback.

vasco4• 2 years ago

This has to be satire.

"Do the wrong thing unless it's for you, in which case ship it earlier", "your job is to make you feel good about what you put in your CV", and other amazing quotes.

The only thing of value in the whole comment is saying to not get too attached to any job or worry too much if you get fired, but even the reason given for it is wrong. Incredible to realize I probably work alongside a few people with the same adversarial attitude.

Some people do like to live life in the wrong game theory quadrant.

aydyn7• 2 years ago

No, everyone lives life in the same "game theory quadrant" whatever that means. People primarily play for themselves including you, some people are just more aware of this fact than others. And also its still always rational to defect.

swat535• 2 years ago

Which part of his comment was satire exactly?

He mentioned that your job as Software Engineer is to focus on Software quality and push against on unreasonable deadlines. It is NOT your job to make sure the company is hitting its sales targets, that's the management's job.

If you think this is satire, you are in the wrong profession and frankly I'm amazed that on a website called Hacker news, people are attacking parent for this advise. Then again, perhaps not since most people here are focused on startups churning out products with unreasonable deadlines.

No wonder no one takes Software seriously if _this_ is the attitude from the self proclaimed "Engineers" themselves..

mrfumier• 2 years ago

Why are you developping?

Is it a hobby for passing time? For pleasure? For the beauty of the code?

Could be. But most of the time, you develop in order for the software to perfom a task someone needs.

And that should be your first focus: to develop something that brings value for its user, and develop it as efficiently as possible. After all, what's the point of a software if nobody uses it? So no, your job is not to create great software, your job is to bring value to users.

In my career, I've mostly seen the developers pleasuring themselves with overengineering, bloating code with features nobody needs, and writing lines to anticipate future developments that never came. Rather than the opposite.

So I think the challenge is to remain minimalistic, that's hard, and that's what the original post is about.

katrotz• 2 years ago

Unfortunately there is no correct approach since both sloppy and overengineered codebases backfire. What helps me find balance is following the philosophy of 1. Make it work 2. Make it right 3. Make it fast

achenet7• 2 years ago

https://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html

If you want to write good software, get it in front of someone who will actually use it as soon as possible.

Get it in front of many people who use it as soon as possible.

No matter how smart you are, you can't anticipate every user need. Let the users tell you what they need.

To do that, you need to ship.

lazyasciiart• 2 years ago

Good news - once you work at a large enough company, this flips to "your job is to finagle your way through a million different safety and security checks at every step in order to write a few lines of code and get them shipped before a pivot and/or re-org makes them irrelevant to your new managers goals".

throwaway847514• 2 years ago

I was one of the first employees in a startup, and if I hadn't made compromises the company would probably not exist today. Your approach only works for big established companies where your team has limited impact on the results.

For small and medium sized companies you definitely need to make compromises. It is part of your job as a professional to make choices that leads to the best business outcome.

Unfortunately a lot of developers don't have a connection to the business side, because they are "protected" by several layers of management, PMs and designers that interact with the business on their behalf.

Getting a product out quickly means that you also get feedback earlier. This is not only good for business, but it is also an opportunity to evaluate your implementation to see if it matches your assumptions. In my experience this causes less stress compared to rolling out a "perfect" solution that has to be rewritten while under pressure.

My job as a developer at my current workplace is to reduce complexity and get the PM and designers to cut down their initial plans to a minimum. It makes arbitrary deadlines less stressful and any delays will not have the same impact.

sisve• 2 years ago

Your job as a sw engineer/architect is to resist the "just ship it" pressure from the management as much as possible. So unless you own what you're coding and you really need it out of the door for your own benefit, if more time makes your work more professional, then take more time. Anyone telling you otherwise is a 100% hack. You are not an automaton that takes in JIRA tickets and spits out hacky code as soon as possible. Or at least you shouldn't be. Not to mention that not taking time (doing things properly) is incredibly taxing on your psyche and you WILL burn out. There are only so much garbage tasks you can take.

Any job, In any industry at any level should be working together with your manager to understand what the company goal and how to achive that. Its always going to be time/price vs quality if you work on creating software or clothing or whatever. There are properly companies and managers that do not care.. but imbany healthy organisation this should be the case. There is not garbage tasks. Its tasks that needs to be done. Any understanding that not all tasks that needs to be done in an organisation is fun but needs to be done is a sign of maturity that you want from your employees

therouwboat• 2 years ago

My boss says our goal is to make quality products, but often we don't even have time to check the parts.

Once there was a problem that machine didn't make good enough surface finish, but boss just said it's fine, let it run. Turns out it wasn't fine and we had to fix 3000 parts with hand sander. That's why I don't like to cut corners.

danparsonson• 2 years ago

There's usually an entire pipeline of people waiting on your work - sales & marketing, ops, support - and every delay you induce risks knock-on effects for them, not to mention that depending on the product, customers can be planning their own workloads around your release schedules, so you'll mess them up too. Not all deadlines are arbitrary.

potsandpans• 2 years ago

What a weird screed.

snozolli4• 2 years ago

if more time makes your work more professional, then take more time. Anyone telling you otherwise is a 100% hack.

It sounds like you're a fan of Total Quality Control, as am I. However, it also sounds like you're susceptible to feature drift and undermining yourself with ideas thought up late in the development cycle, as am I.

I've seen it from both sides. Software people who want to get just one more feature in, or who want to hold up release to fix an inconsequential bug. Similarly, the CEO who ruminates all weekend and decides we have to revamp something for no objective reason and on a ridiculous deadline.

IanCal4• 2 years ago

it is NOT your job to make sure the company is the most profitable it can be. Your job is to create great software.

Your job is to create great software for the company and your definition of great software is therefore defined by the company.

. What's great software? The kind you'd be willing to put on your resume without feeling bad.

If your idea of a good CV is one where you can say "I deliberately made the following companies less money than I could have: ..." then I'm not sure who you're applying to with confidence.

Sammi• 2 years ago

I would not hire you. I would worry that you would take my money, and not ship anything that makes my company money. I could just as well burn my money for all the good it would do my company.

You do know that the point of a company is to make money, right?

tdeck• 2 years ago

A few years ago I built a payment system for Google Forms as a side business (made about $3k from it before eventually turning it off to focus on other things). I'd found a problem nobody was actually solving and wanted to see if they'd be willing to pay to solve it. Like many of us I also had a bunch of partly finished projects that were never released, so I knew it could be a struggle to ship things.

What I ended up doing was writing a list of all the features that I wasn't going to work on, and all the compromises I was going to make to get something out there. Some of those compromises really hurt when I was writing them down, but didn't end up mattering enough to change them for over a year. Once I had them on the list, it gave me permission not to thing about them while I implemented the rest.

I also staged the development to avoid anything unnecessary if it flopped. For revenue, the idea was that I'd get a card on file from you, then bill it each month. But I launched the thing with no integration at all for the card on file. My plan was to give people a 14 day free trial, and if anyone actually used it in that time I'd use the time to build a card acceptance flow using Square (their API is like Stripe's). It turns out people did find and use it, and I had to extend the trial a bit, but eventually built the form. Then I had until the first of the next month to build the system to total up their bill (based on usage) and charge the card on file using the rest of Square's API.

I also didn't build anything at all for scheduling account lifecycle events. I used varmail.me (a little thing I wrote forever ago) to have my app email me when someone signed up, and check my inbox a couple times daily and send a canned welcome message to any new users. Then I'd write an email reminding me user X's trial expired, set myself as the recipient, and use Gmail scheduled messages to schedule it 14 days in the future. When I got that email I'd check if they're still using the product, send them a reminder to put in their card on file, and manually mark their account as inactive until they enter a form of payment. Billing jobs were run manually by me on my laptop for a while. Over time I got more users and it was worth the effort to replace these manual processes with automated ones. If nobody had used my product, it wouldn't have been worth the effort to automate any of this.

Testing was another thing I experimented with doing differently. At first I tested everything manually. Automating tests was difficult anyway because the key flow redirects through PayPal, and there were parts written in Google Apps Script. Eventually I built an end-to-end selenium test. Then I started adding unit tests where appropriate. Basically my principle was that I added automated tests to any area where I felt uneasy about making changes for fear of breaking something. Since I'm fairly risk-averse, the product was small, and I worked on it solo, this worked well for me.

f3b5• 2 years ago

Thanks for sharing! I'm going through the same thing at the moment, and it's nice to read that this pragmatic approach has worked well for you

solatic• 2 years ago

I wish someone would solve my problem for me. I'm working on the problem because there are no solutions that I can just go and buy. Someone else putting their blood, sweat, and tears into solving my problem, they're the ones who have to deal with being on-call for it, they're the ones who have to maintain it, would be a joy.

Why is it so important for you to be the one to solve this problem? Why is it so important for your solution to the problem to be a business? Running a business is about creating value for yourself and for your customer - if you're obsessed about the problem, be thankful that someone else is putting so much effort into solving it; if you're obsessed about the customer, then you would've shipped something to the customer a long time ago to get feedback.

ZaoLahma• 2 years ago

I guess some solo dev engineers hope to implement a novel idea, curate the implementation into a somewhat successful business (have a firm grip on the market) and then sell it all off to a bigger fish and make bank.

I don't think many people actually want to run a business (long term), but most of us wouldn't mind suddenly being paid a good chunk of money for having solved or worked on an interesting problem.

thekitze11• 2 years ago

in my case, I would never sell Benji to anyone else because my life literally depends on it. The business part is hard tho.

thekitze11• 2 years ago

author here: for me it was important because after a while the app I was using was stale and wasn't shipping updates anymore. Also, as I was learning more about productivity, I reached the limits of the app. I wanted more features and I was coming up with tons of ideas that I could implement into my app, and other devs wouldn't care about implementing these ideas. I wanted control. So I finally shipped Benji (https://benji.so)

pacifika• 2 years ago

There’s usually room for more than one implementation of an idea, most of the target audience haven’t committed yet?

raincole2• 2 years ago

Perhaps it's just me, but I can't stand the "I'm trying so hard to be funny" writing style.

pm90• 2 years ago

Agreed. It’s very exhausting to read. A few well timed digs are ok but you need to not overdo it.

thekitze11• 2 years ago

it's not just you, people have different preferences and that's fine :D

netmare• 2 years ago

I'm also not a fan of overly-funny writing, but I just wanted to say that I found your style quite enjoyable. Maybe it's because a can relate somewhat to your situation... :b

StopHammoTime• 2 years ago

It's unfair he didn't include the name of the app in the article (or it's unfair that I can't see properly, if he did). I want to see what this problem was he was trying to solve!

zogrodea5• 2 years ago

The author posted a comment here about that, and that this article is about https://benji.so/ . Sounds like HN comments were persuasive in releasing the app that triggered the article.

Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40872817

aorloff• 2 years ago

Shipping code is a whole separate product from your product

Its your first devops product, and how well you do that is going to affect your actual product

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

I've got three separate applications all "close to finished" and I've been working on them for years (along with many other things).

Just as I'm getting real close to being finished enough to release - something changes - life changes - or some other thing changes - or I don't believe in the product any more - then I do believe in the product again - then blah blah blah. Always "legitimate" reasons - outcome always the same - haven't shipped anything in years except a bunch of open source projects.

thekitze11• 2 years ago

Sorry to hear that. As someone who actually shipped a lot of things, i'm still going through the "I believe in it" and "don't believe in it" cycle almost daily. Don't let that stop you.

edg5000• 2 years ago

I found that becoming an actual user of your own system changes the perspective entirely. I had this thing that I was making for myself, and it was not ready, not usable at all, or so I thought.

After giving up on the project I decided to try and actually started using it as if I was a user. I realised that as users, we are used to countless minor issues, and we automatically find ways around that. When you are the creator of something, you sometimes forget that a lot of sloppyness will not be a dealbreaker, and the user will effortlessly work around many of the shortcomings. Obtaining perfection is more about ego at that point.

So trying to actually use it, ignoring that you are the one who made it, and forbidding yourself to make any modifications for a while, can change everything!

knallfrosch• 2 years ago

Interesting point. An app I just used had an embedded ios web browser that didn't work properly.

I opened the web page directly and used it like that. The username/password were iCloud-synced, of course. Took me all of 5 seconds to resume the user flow in Safari (which only took another 30 seconds to finish.)

thekitze11• 2 years ago

I 100% agree with you.

tstrimple• 2 years ago

I think this is why ship it and iterate fast is often the best path. There will be deal breaking bugs in any software project. If your accounting package doesn’t account correctly, you probably shouldn’t just ship it. But if one of the reports displays twice for some reason, users can probably deal with it until the next iteration as long as that next iteration isn’t months to years away. But the reality is you wont even find what most of the “bugs” your users will encounter until it’s out in the wild with real users. And unless you ship it, you’ll not get to work on the bugs your users are actually impacted by.

blackbrokkoli• 2 years ago

That's a cool take, thank you!

I think it's something that I already knew in my heart, but I think by putting it like this you killed some shipping anxiety and perfectionism tendency in me. Thanks :)

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

Isn't this more a lesson of keeping your cards close to your chest?

There's a very good reason why people are on guard with pitch decks. Cause those very people you pitched could just take the idea and throw money at it.

shalmanese4• 2 years ago

No, almost certainly the other people didn't start the project because they saw his video and were so inspired by the idea they rushed off to build it. Almost certainly, it was a case of parallel evolution where they faced a similar problem and there are only so many parameters in the design space so they figured out a similar solution.

People who focus on ideas think their ideas are so inspirational and unique that they must be protected. In reality, anyone who has tried to go out actively and convince anyone else to build their "brilliant" idea quickly realizes the level of indifference and lack of engagement anyone else has to your baby.

rob743• 2 years ago

That "those guys" may have seen the video he posted was just an unsubstantiated suspicion of his though. The sad part about having brilliant ideas for apps (as I have also found out, fortunately before putting a lot of effort into the idea) is that there are millions of other developers in the world, and one of them is almost guaranteed to have had the same idea a bit earlier than you. Unless it's a super niche thing, but then the market for it is also super tiny...

thekitze11• 2 years ago

After years of building in public, I'm scared that you're right. But the problem is, my app is now live (benji.so), and it's publicly out there for people with VC money to start copying features from it ...

purple-leafy2• 2 years ago

I highly disagree. 99.99% of peoples SaaS ideas aren’t innovative.

It’s more about the people, their resources, their experience.

I’d say this is a misinformed opinion, maybe from lack of experience.

neontomo• 2 years ago

an added benefit of shipping early is you get a feeling for whether people are interested, before you spend a year developing a toaster that eats its own toast.

rob743• 2 years ago

So, he's a fan (and paying subscriber) of his "competitor" app now, but still not enough of a fan to actually mention what app it is. Which is kind of frustrating, I read until the end of the post to see if it's mentioned, but it isn't. And it also leaves me with a nagging suspicion that the whole story may just be completely made up (or at least grossly exaggerated)...

thekitze11• 2 years ago

It's not made up, I'm not using the competitor app for years, and I didn't want to give them more attention because this space is super competitive.

mriziq2• 2 years ago

Tick tick tick …

thekitze11• 2 years ago

Author here! I need to update this article. Years later, I actually got motivated by the comments on HN (whenever this gets posted). P

People are always like "why don't you just ship your app?" ... so I did!

I'm happy I went through with and it's way WAY better than any competitor in this category

Check it out at https://benji.so (landing page is still w.i.p)

rob743• 2 years ago

Hi! Looks great, maybe I'll give it a try... Is it named after this guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benji ? I was a huge fan of him (them?) when I was about 6-8 years old!

...and sorry about expressing my frustration (and suspicion) about you not mentioning the name of your "competitor"! I guess now that you have released your own app, the chances of you mentioning it are even smaller (if it's still around at all)?

thekitze11• 2 years ago

It's named after my dog Benji haha. Yes you're right, I'm not gonna mention any competitors, especially on a viral HN article :) There's a chance I might make a /comparison page in the future though.

pantulis2• 2 years ago

I just tried it and the detected timezone for me is called:

"Africa/Ceuta (Romance Standard Time) (UTC+01:00) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris"

While the assigned delta with GMT is correct, this is confusing as hell because neither Brussels, Copenhaguen, Madrid or Paris are in Africa. You may want to take a look at the TZ info you are using.

EDIT: See comment below, this is not an issue.

com2• 2 years ago

But Africa/Ceuta time aligns with CE(S)T for longstanding national administrative reasons, I believe. That’s why those other cities are listed, since Africa/Ceuta time is not linked by policy, regulation or legislation with any African time zones…

Time is one of those human constructs that isn’t strongly bound to geographic or perhaps even physical reality. Look at the International Date Line or Chinese timezone maps for examples that are “bigger” than Africa/Melila and Africa/Ceuta.

We should all be glad that people are thanklessly doing the hard work to keep the TZ databases updated.

philipwhiuk• 2 years ago

The landing page lags my browser. How is that even possible - it's a splash screen with a few images. What on earth are you doing on that page.

OvbiousError2• 2 years ago

Rotating an image and moving some text apparently

wellbehaved• 2 years ago

OK Steve.

udev4096• 2 years ago

The author complains about the bloated web and then proceeds to do the exact same thing with his landing page

micimize• 2 years ago

I went through an unshipped app dev cycle that was fairly similar in many ways. Started on React, then RN, then Flutter, and eventually migrated away from graphql into sqlite.

My app had some similar aspirations -- to bridge the gap between habit motivation, goal adherence measurement, task scheduling & rescheduling. I worked on it for a few years, and my identity was very much wrapped up in eventually bootstrapping a company.

For me, the decision to let go of the project came in multiple phases, but one big closer was that I simply didn't want to be an app dev in the long run. While difficult to let go of, I currently feel good about the decision. Also, as evidenced by the resurrection part of the story, "nothing is ever fully lost" anyhow, though I doubt I'll ever return to this particular project.

One key idea I had for expanding beyond the "high cognitive load" nature of most productivity apps was to implement a "life module" marketplace of sorts that would let, say, a fitness influencer sell a workout routine + meal plan + journal template one could "install" into their life.

LLMs will also make detecting fall-off and attempting to attribute causes, or respond to "non-actions" much more feasible, which I think is important for anyone not type-A enough to use a productivity app consistently every day on their own.

idk1• 2 years ago

Hi there, I can't see your white menu links on the white background, thought you'd like to know - https://i.imgur.com/Yd1hniV.png

protocolture6• 2 years ago

I have a loose product idea. I guess the difference between some ideas and others is in prototyping. My prototype works. The issue is that the market for the product is like maybe 600 people global. And its not just code thats required, but plastic injection moulding, hardware manufacturing etc.

dazhbog• 2 years ago

How do you know it's 600? what would be the sale price? Sometimes with a little modification, a hw product can work in multiple b2b verticals ;)

Ive done a few products myself with injection molding, production pcbs, etc. and it's amazing how different customers look at it and ask for different features.

protocolture6• 2 years ago

Super niche, combines 2-3 other products that are individually expensive and dont have any real reason to be together.

DidYaWipe3• 2 years ago

I'm expecting to experience this any day now. I've experienced it before, seeing people make hundreds of millions of dollars on an idea I'd already built (and my employer had fumbled the marketing of) and was actively working to resurrect... but couldn't figure out how to "monetize."

Currently my problem is being a one-man band. I've realized I can't "just ship" a product that relies on a hand-rolled user-authorization scheme that I create with very little experience. So now I've interrupted my whole project to learn Supabase and oh yeah, containers... because I've never used those either and as far as I can tell I'd better use those for deployment and scalability.

And oh yeah, I had to learn SwiftUI (already knew Swift & iOS pretty well) to write the app... and also JavaScript/TypeScript and Deno for the back end. So now I'm entering year two and still trying to vacuum up knowledge fast enough to get this thing out the door before someone else announces it.

I've been thinking that I'd have to hire someone to consult on security and scaling as I finish up actual functionality. But the days go by...

jezek23• 2 years ago

I've realized I can't "just ship" a product that relies on a hand-rolled user-authorization scheme that I create with very little experience.

Time to ship and get the experience :) It is probably not that bad as you think it is. You can also ask others if they see any obvious security/cryptography fails and you would do better than most including big companies...

So now I've interrupted my whole project to learn Supabase and oh yeah, containers... because I've never used those either and as far as I can tell I'd better use those for deployment and scalability.

Please don't. Leave it for later if it is truly needed. You can ship without. Don't be lured to the clouds, they're too expensive and you will need to learn and change a lot.

Instead use VPSes and/or dedicated servers from cheap providers such as OVH/Hetzner. Just running your server app on a normal Linux VM is a way simpler than any cloud solution. It can also handle quite a lot, it might surprise you. And you wouldn't get insane invoices for 10-100x overpriced traffic that the clouds have and that kills many ideas even when it would make sense to do them in the cloud otherwise.

DidYaWipe3• 2 years ago

Thanks for the advice! I did run a somewhat similar app with essentially no API security on a cheap-ass Linode VPS around 2011. But we only had 10-20K users and those extremely sporadic. But, although users controlled their content, it was totally anonymous. I didn't require a single credential, not even an E-mail address.

One thing about Supabase is that it's supposed to offer user verification through E-mail out of the box, which saves me the time of hand-rolling that.

The reason I want containers is to spin up multiple instances if the thing blows up. Isn't it easier to do that with containerized services?

lelanthran• 2 years ago

I hand-rolled my authn scheme in half a day (backend endpoints only; f/end HTML took a longer). In addition to sign-in with email/password combo, it also does passwordless (i.e. if a user set their profile to password-less, anytime they attempt to sign in it sends a password to their email that is valid for 15m).

It's better (i.e. more secure) than at least two currently-in-use corporate systems I have seen.

And no, I don't store plaintext passwords, and I do use a generated random salt when a password is set, and the crypto functions I use are well-regarded and well-used, not something I wrote myself.

In summary, I don't think it should take two days for a minimal authn/sign-up/sign-in implementation.

purple-leafy2• 2 years ago

Okay I gave up reading because it’s written by a man-baby. So cringe.

So you made a proof of concept and rested on your laurels. Too bad, that’s life. They did the work and reaped the rewards.

Lesson learnt. You can’t claim ideas

xlinux• 2 years ago

The real problem I face is finding users. you are not allowed to post your app anywhere (excluding hn).

It's called advertising or spam they say

pjc503• 2 years ago

There's hundreds of thousands of apps. People aren't going to invest any effort in evaluating them.

rawbert• 2 years ago

When I read this I was like "Oh, that sounds like my family calendar / collaborative productivty app I am working on for months ". And in the last sentence he mentions

I wanted an app that combines Todos, Habits, Planner, Goals, Pomodoros, Meal tracking, Fasting, Hydration, Packing, Trips, and many many more features.

Surprised Pikachu face.

torlok• 2 years ago

Not the best example of "just ship it". The thing about these productivity apps (TODO, habit tracking, spending tracking, journaling, workout planning etc.) is that lots of people have these ideas independently. You can't imagine how clever I felt when I thought of the idea of an app that helps you keep track of your expenses. Then I checked the Play Store. KRAZAM even made fun of it the "The Hustle" video 5 years ago.

realharo• 2 years ago

Yeah, this is probably the most overdone app category in the history of overdone app categories.

That's not to say that a new twist on it can't be successful (most successful things aren't entirely original), but if you're worrying about someone releasing their version earlier and beating you, just take a look around.

satvikpendem• 2 years ago

Then I checked the Play Store

I think you missed the point of the article, which is to ship it despite competitors; in fact, competitors validate your idea, it is a good sign, not a bad one.

spacecadet• 2 years ago

"If you have an idea, statistically 1500 other people are also having that same idea" Execution trumps ideas. It also does not need to be fast! I have seen it go all ways at this point, and I still stand by another stupid quote, "slow and steady wins the race". The real problem lies in whether you mature your idea into something with long term value. If you ask me, fast ideas, fast execution = garbage in, garbage out.

dspillett• 2 years ago

If I was writing something for myself, I'd not be sad that someone had beat me to it: it just proves that the idea was a good one!

Then again, none of the many personal projects I've got in my head and on paper (few of them even actually started) are ones that I would release to sell. They are things that I want or that friends/family/other might find useful. Heck, if I had something Alpha quality maybe I'd release that in the hopes someone would see it and think “this idea is useful, but the implementation is shite, I'll write a better one”.

nyokodo• 2 years ago

If I was writing something for myself, I'd not be sad that someone had beat me to it

The reality is that you’ve already been beaten to the punch by something in almost every situation. If you’re automating something for the first time in history then the preexisting manual method is your initial competitor. In the case of the app in the article they’re competing against that other app but also every other possible patchwork of partial solutions that their target customers are already using.

Additionally, if you are the first mover then you’ll quickly have competitors rise up and eat away at your advantage without your effort to stay ahead competitively.

So, since you’re always scooped then don’t worry about being scooped and since competition now or later is a certainty then instead focus on your competitive advantage. The author came to this realization in the end, bravo and good luck!

omerhac• 2 years ago

Hahaha, laughed my ass off.

Can you name the largest factor to why you did not ship it? Is it fear? shyness? Thinking that you only have 1 chance with your clients?

SergeAx• 2 years ago

What do I feel like I just read an advertisement article for a productivity app?

RevEng2• 2 years ago

What was your purpose in developing this app? It sounds like you were trying to solve a problem you had for which there were no other good solutions. If this was the primary purpose, then it's only meant for you and not for anyone else, so why "ship it"? For personal use, shipping it simply means using it.

If you want to produce a product to sell, then yes, for the most part you want to ship as soon as you have a minimum viable product - something that at least accomplishes something valuable, even if it could be better.

But if you're working on something for fun and you consider open sourcing it, don't rush into shipping it. As soon as you release it to the public, people will start hounding you to fix bugs and add features. If you try to please them, you'll quickly find yourself working a part time job for no pay - your hobby will turn into a burden.

Releasing anything to the public - whether for profit or not - opens you up to a lot of pressure and judgement. You are making a commitment, whether you intend to or not.

Before shipping it, think carefully about whether you want to commit to supporting it. If not, then just keep it to yourself.

Giving up on a project - even one that works - isn't a bad thing. People change. Just because you wanted to work on it 6 months ago doesn't mean you want to do it now. Don't feel obligated to keep doing something you no longer enjoy. Often the important thing is that you went through the process - you learned a lot and you overcame a challenge. You can leave it at that and still be a success.

ozim• 2 years ago

I am a bit snarky but it is yet another todo app.

Author is a bit high on his own supply - he thinks someone copied his great ideas where I see it as generic silly widgets. So of course he thinks it is great so much that people will love it … but just reading the thread I see the other app he was paying for stopped implementing features, because no todo app is „super great idea”.

Well good job implementing, good effort, but that’s just „yet another todo app”.

thecleaner• 2 years ago

But what's the problem that is being solved with a productivity app ? I actually use a spreadsheet program for this and it does a better job than most apps. I don't it matters what "the vision" is really.

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