The danger of releasing too early

The examples the author cites:

- a film which was released in 'beta' at Cannes, giving it a bad name

- voice-recognition of contact names for mobiles, where the technology became widespread before it was usable

- his own experience of demoing a product without a nice interface to a client, causing the client to lose faith in the project.

What is the commonality between these three scenarios that isn't generally shared by web startups? (I don't know if the article was aimed at web startups, but it's relevant here). Each time, the crappy version 1 was shown to a large segment or some key players in the market (film critics, a huge number of mobile phone owners, and the sole client), and put them off the product.

I have a friend who is worried about this for his web startup. "If people see it when it looks crap, they won't come back". The thing with web startups is the few hundred people who might see it in the crappy phase will likely be a very small slice of your total market.

What I attach to here is the idea that buzz comes from very rapid assessments made by a target audience.

It's such a classic engineering mistake to demo their perfect casino server with crappy graphics on the front-end: I've made that mistake many times.

Engineers frequently fail to understand what non-engineers care about and need. Anyway, I like the general ideas he presents, but I think that his film and casino project stories would have been really different if rather than sending something that had all the technical guts in place, they sent something flashy which still needed plumbing work.

In the case of the movie, this could have been 10 minutes of awesomeness.

In the case of the casino thing, this could have been a cheapo flash demo made by some uber-designer, with a lot of handwaving on the back-end.

Both of these would have yielded better results than showing real state of the projects.

I guess I believe that nobody cares about plumbing except plumbers / engineers. Unless engineers are going to buy your product (and they'll still likely have to demo it for a non-engineer to get a purchase okay), I think it makes a huge amount of sense to aim for some initial flash.

Probably nobody needs this advice more than me, so I'm going to read it back to myself every day for a week in the hopes that it will stick..

I really like the car analogy he makes: If your client asks for a car and you want to iterate, don't show them a frame with wheels on it, show them a skateboard. A skateboard is useful in its own right, although it doesn't have all of the features that they will want in the end. Iterate to a bike, a motorcycle, and finally a car, but at each stage you have something that works on its own.

There was another article on HN a while ago about differentiating between features and core functionality, and making sure to focus on the core functionality first before you try to add the extras. Also, knowing which parts of the UI/UX are part of the core functionality is important, as is illustrated in the author's demo product fiasco anecdote. As a developer I tend to focus more on the back end functionality and supporting systems, but something can be technically beautiful and still look like useless crap to your intended users.

Nice post, had similar experiences few times when i blamed myself for too early delivery.

The problem with agile or iterative process(although i am a big fan of it) is that some clients (usually non techs) are just not ready for that! But its amazing how many Project managers still cant understand that most of clients just DONT NEED their product to be shown week earlier but without nice design it meant to have. They are so much inspired with books and articles about “release early and iterate” that they just assume that client will be also happy to be iterative. So they forget about more fundamental rule -keep your client happy all the time! So keep that in mind before you decide to go agile make sure that client is fine with it, understand it and manage his expectations carefully!