‘Usage is like oxygen for ideas’ – a message for all perfectionists

Matt Mullenweg knows a thing or two about making something amazing and putting it out in the world. He’s the founding developer of WordPress. You might have heard of it: it’s blogging software that’s used by, oh, 27 million people or so (including me – thanks, guys!). Matt writes a pretty tidy blog himself, and in a recent post he made some great points that resonate for writers and publishers too.

He talks about his experience of grappling with the question, ‘when is my app/manuscript/whatever ready to go out into the world?’ He describes the drawn-out process of releasing WordPress version 2.1, more than a year after version 2.0 hit the world. That’s an eternity in software terms.

What killed us was “one more thing.” We could have easily done three major releases that year if we had drawn a line in the sand, said “finished,” and shipped the darn thing. The problem is that the longer it’s been since your last release the more pressure and anticipation there is, so you’re more likely to try to slip in just one more thing or a fix that will make a feature really shine. For some projects, this literally goes on forever.

I imagine prior to the launch of the iPod, or the iPhone, there were teams saying the same thing: the copy + paste guys are *so close* to being ready and we know Walt Mossberg is going to ding us for this so let’s just not ship to the manufacturers in China for just a few more weeks… The Apple teams were probably embarrassed. But if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long.

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world. It’s even worse because development doesn’t happen in a vacuum — if you have a halfway decent idea, you can be sure that there are two or three teams somewhere in the world that independently came up with it and are working on the same thing, or something you haven’t even imagined that disrupts the market you’re working in. (Think of all the podcasting companies — including Ev Williams’ Odeo — before iTunes built podcasting functionality in.)

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

Writers producing manuscripts that will become books, especially ones on paper (that’s not a given these days) don’t always have the luxury of knowing that they can easily release an updated version once the market embraces this first version. That may never happen. But at some point you simply have to get this book out there – before you love it and work it to death, or before someone else beats you to it.