Couple of months and you’re half way? So if you cut some scope you can launch by dec 31st right?
I have no idea what you’re working on but I bet you don’t launch till March at least.
I have no idea what you’re working on but I bet you don’t launch till March at least.
I am mostly done with the bare minimum of what I need for it to be usable for myself. I have a little more work to do. Not much though, I've tested the most of the bits I still need to do. Now I just need take that learning and finish building it.
I think I'm only halfway because I need to get billing working (planning on integrating with Stripe - there goes my no JS goal...), fix the CSS so it doesn't look terrible (doesn't need to be fancy, just passable), and work on my error logging / reporting. So... mostly polish. But not feature polish, but "don't drive away potential users via stupid stuff" polish.
Edit: I do hope to launch by Jan. 1 since new years resolutions could be a great driving force for new user signups, but your assessment is a reasonable guess.
They gave users a 30 day trial period, so starting on launch day, they had precisely 30 days to get billing sorted out if they hoped to be able to charge anyone.
A free trial period may or may not be suitable for your product. But you can probably get by without it on launch day.
You could even launch in beta mode and give people access in exchange for feedback.
If you're targeting graphic designers, then go ahead and tweak that CSS. Otherwise, go ahead and get some real people using it. If they're using it to solve a pain point, they'll quickly tell you what's good and what's not. And if they don't use it at all...well, that's valuable feedback too.
If you could find yourself a 5-10 beta customers, perhaps launching to them before billing is ready might work? You could even perhaps set a cap on how many SMS messages they can send per day or week. That would keep your costs low while still getting you some feedback.
You should of course do whatever is best for your product. I've just learned from experience that launching as soon as you can is great, because you'll often find that many of your assumptions about how and why people will use your product don't match how they actually use it.