If you review your first site version and don’t feel embarrassment, you spent too much time on it.
—
Reid Hoffman, as quoted in Mark Goldenson’s 10 lessons from a failed startup, a post-mortem of what PlayCafe’s founders did right and wrong.
Reid Hoffman, as quoted in Mark Goldenson’s 10 lessons from a failed startup, a post-mortem of what PlayCafe’s founders did right and wrong.
Mark C. Webster
on 21 May 09That’s great. I just met with a startup yesterday who were joking about what their site looked like when they first launched.
It’s funny when you can look back at what started it all and cringe.
Diwant Vaidya
on 21 May 09I like it! Yes, very embarrasing.
Michael
on 21 May 09Haha. I am creating something embarrassing as we speak!
Andrew
on 21 May 09Ha! Couldn’t have said it better myself.
mark
on 21 May 09So true.
However, it seems no matter how good a design is I get tired of it over time.
Nate
on 21 May 09I know you guys put up quotes that you might not necessarily agree with but are thought provoking. And I’m curious about this one. How soon is this “review”, 1 week after launch or 6 months?
We can all look back on stuff we first designed and developed and see we’ve come so far in our style and tastes. But you guys seem to put enough polish on early releases, do you guys launch something if your at all embarrassed in that moment about a piece of that something?
That seems to be the benefit of focusing on half a product. Don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on adding feature bulk, but then spend a lot of that saved time on polish.
Ben
on 21 May 09Excellent article on learning from your failures.
Michael Riley
on 21 May 09@Ben i think you might have missed the point, haha
this keeps with the same paradigm of avoiding “planning paralysis”, i always run into that when i’m coding something new
Michael Diamond
on 22 May 09We’ve looked back through the first sites that we did and track how we improved over time. I think it’s more important to track how you’ve improved than cringe at how bad you were in the past.
Mikael
on 22 May 09The point here is that if your first release is perfect, then you are likely to have wasted a lot of time on it; whereas you could have gotten to the same result after several iterations, and that would have cost less.
CJ Curtis
on 22 May 09While I get the point (sort of), the idea that being embarrassed about your web site (1st or 50th) is a good thing…or NOT feeling embarrassment is a BAD thing… is pretty ridiculous.
We all look at things we did a long time ago and have a laugh, but this comment suggests that laughable is OK…even necessary.
Dan
on 23 May 09Great quote, and probably the only valuable insight to take from that article.
Failure is overrated, as it`s the saying here.
Michael Troy
on 25 May 09This quote has completely altered the way I work (just in the past week). I feel like I have actually produced more work. Combine this quote with GTD and Boom!
This discussion is closed.