Ship it, software and newsletter

I’ve been meaning to link to “this post by Justin Williams”:log.carpeaqua.com/post/3266… on shipping his Today app quickly:

"I'm a big fan of foundation releases. In other words, release the bare minimum you possibly can to constitute a 1.0 and then let your users help decide the direction your application ships."

There is always more to do, a never-ending stream of features you could implement for 1.0, and the same can be set for other non-software projects. When I started preparing a newsletter last month, the features crept on: I should have a coupon code, and maybe a special URL to track links, or a survey, or HTML email design instead of plain text.

I explored most of these options before finally realizing it was more important that I send the newsletter than wait for it to be perfect and solve every problem. In the end I’m glad I didn’t spend much time on it, because overall the newsletter was not very successful, providing just a blip in web site traffic and negligible increase in sales.

Manton Reece @manton