Disclaimer: this paragraph contains sensitive language for indie developers.
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If your product is bound to fail (it happens to all of us, and I said ‘if’), wouldn’t it be nice to know it very fast, without wasting time and resources? Our time is limited and if Idea #7 or #8 is the one that will work and put your on the map, you need to waste as little time as possible with your first 6 attempts right?
Well, shipping fast is the perfect way to put your products in the hands of your customers. Past this point, we can just hope they will show you the way with suggestions & feedbacks and you can start improving your product, release after release.
You’ll get the usual ‘complainers’ that do not understand what a v1 is and expect everything to work perfectly with all the features they can think of, on day one. Ignore those or filter their feedback and only keep what’s helpful to your roadmap but don’t let the negativity affect your motivation. Generally, seeing users talking to you is a great sign that you build something useful that can be improved.
But I’m drifting here. Let’s get back to where we were in Part 3: our mind-map full of exciting features. Where do we go from there? How do we build and ship this fast?