If You're Building An App, Do This

The new iPhones dropped on Friday and I spent the weekend making two videos about them.

With a product launch like this, it's important to get the videos out as soon as possible.

The short deadline almost makes the process more enjoyable.

There are only a few times per year I make videos this quickly, and it always feels good to get them out.

With these deadlines in mind, I realized I wasn't leveraging this same power for Creator Kiwi.

Since I launched the beta for this product, I've been slowly working towards my v1 launch.

I haven't had a date set for my Product Hunt launch or even a clear scope in mind.

I've known that the moment I give myself a date to finish by, I'll start working significantly faster.

I have a trip coming up at the end of October, so I gave myself a deadline of October 21st to fully launch my product.

It's only been a few days since I set that deadline, and I've already built out a significant overhaul of two pages in the app.

You haven't been able to search or filter the People (similar to contacts in a CRM) or Links you have in Creator Kiwi.

There's just been a massive wall you have to scroll through.

One of the primary improvements I'm focusing on for the launch is making analytics easier to consume.

Now that you can search a link by its URL or a Person by their name, it makes the data in the system more valuable.

I only have a month from today to finish, so I've been forced to set a scope for the project.

In the last two months, I've spent most of my time building features that could have waited for a future release.

That only happened because I was "waiting until it's ready."

I was disguising fear as perfection.

I've not started a real marketing push yet because I don't feel like the product is ready to show to a larger audience.

But this makes me remember the quote "if you aren't embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late."

Feedback is the most valuable thing when you're building a new product.

Delaying a launch only limits the amount you can get.

I've been trying to prioritize new features by focusing on what functionality NEEDS to be present, rather than building things people could ask for later.

The trap I want to avoid is building features nobody asked for or would ever use.

I would rather wait for someone to ask for something than spend weeks coding without knowing if it's valuable.

If you're currently building your MVP, I highly recommend setting a date when you'll show it to the world.

Have a great week.

Cole

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