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Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

The Wufoo example is awful. Shouldn't have taken more than 5 min for them to realize, "HEY the Flash experience on GNU/Linux sucks! Maybe we shouldn't use it so that we can have more customers use the thing!"

Those 3 versions of GMail could have been one version that was most useful. There was no time constraint for it since it was a side-project.

The links to nowhere sounds like a good idea except I don't think it indicates interest in the feature being built. A link's text is usually very short and you don't really get any demographics from a click. If you knew 15 to 20 yr olds were clicking a link but the rest of the site was mainly used by 30 to 40 yr olds, you might want to spin out the link as a separate site instead of just a new feature or something. But how do you know how interested people really are? :/

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Actually, it turned out that the complaints coming from Linux users about Flash being used in Wufoo in the early prototype was disproportionate to the future demographics of our actual customers and so it honestly didn't make any difference in terms of our revenue today based on our current application usage. I think Linux users account for less than 2% of our user base.

In retrospect, a good number of those complaints came from Reddit users when we were just getting out the door. Our startup was only a few weeks old then and I have to say that the feedback felt overwhelming.

In the end, the decision to remove Flash in the builder was a good one because it resulted in a much simpler interface that was easier to use, but to say that it should have been obvious or that it really mattered, would be overstating it.

Then the Wufoo example is mistated in the blog. The feedback was useful for deciding on interface changes but not useful for deciding on platform/technology changes which is what it seems to imply.

So I'll change what I said...It shouldn't have taken you more than 5 min to realize that GNU/Linux users wouldn't have been a huge percentage of your users and you could have gotten away with ignoring their advice on Flash/Javascript.

It's a good case against releasing early and asking for feedback...you have no idea if the market segment using your product is the one you will be targetting in a few months.

So the conclusion you think is obvious changes after you get more data, but you still think the data are not important for reaching that conclusion?

Interesting criticisms of PB's approach to building gmail. Can you share a link to a product you've shipped in the past 12 months and some of your experiences about building it?

Is that an appeal to authority I hear? I haven't worked on a product that has shipped in the last 12 months but I have worked with several programming languages and have read some Dijkstra and have done some literate programming, and have gone to university/college for a few years now.

My criticism was based on the stuff PB said. All of that functionality could have been done in a single version but PB didn't want to waste company resources unless he could offer up proof that they were being used wisely.

There's nothing wrong with that, but to say that it's a good development model is awful. How long did GMail stay in beta for? It never really shipped.

GMail has 100+ million users[1]. Imagine how many they could have if they actually did ship something. Crappy development model or not, does it really matter? The thing is widely successful and any insight into how it came about is valuable as a learning experience.

[1]: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fc3d8a86-02a0-11de-b58b-000077b076...

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