I haven't shipped anything and I'm not going to make it

I regret to say, I haven’t shipped anything yet.

What to ship?

Ship the bare minimum. It doesn’t have to be hard to build, really. Anyone could build it. But - it needs to be shipped.

Something I’ve learned recently: shipping and launching are disjoint events. You can just ship it, and let people organically discover it. The “launch” event, is just the marketing and announcement.

So ship it. Bitch.

The bare minimum. No, really

There’s a good exercise to finding out the bare minimum - what if you did it manually?

Everything software does is something a human has done, or can do, manually. Before email, someone was hired to walk around the office and leave letters at the respective desks.

Could you do it manually?

Software business opportunities are often hidden, because they were pointless to do manually in the first place. It was too expensive, or slow. But what part of it could you do manually?

With Talk, a script that wraps LLaMa and TTS to simulate a conversation, I manually hit the respond button.

Validate.

Write down what you need to do to ship

What is the bare minimum that you would have to do, to in fact ship?

• Domain route goes to machine

• Machine has a web server listening to port 80

• The web server interfaces useful business logic

• Some SPA calls the web server to do useful things

• The SPA logs you in on landing

That’s it!

Get to turd polish mode as fast as possible

The reason you want to ship something out is that you can start empathizing with the user sooner. If you don’t have anything to try, how could you know to make it better?

As far as I can tell, turd polishing (the right thing) is the moat.

---

Raw notes at yacine.ca

Are my notes/blog posts useful to you? Throw me a one time money upvote!