Learning to Ship
Recently I launched APAC Agencies in just one week, after procrastinating on it for months. This was a great exercise in learning how to stop over-thinking and actually ship a product. Here’s what helped:
Working with a partner
My original design was hardly inspiring, so I asked Oygar for help. Being a solo founder can be hard. Being able to bounce off ideas, keeping each other accountable and making steady progress kept us both inspired and helped us build momentum.
Fixing scope instead of time
Setting out to launch the project in a week forced us to make hard decisions early-on. Instead of fixing scope, we fixed the deadline and cut down the scope. That forced us to focus and ask ourselves at every step: does this feature help us ship faster? Will this feature deliver value from day one? Can we get away without building it now?
Picking the right tools
Originally I was convinced that this site needed to have user accounts, OAuth, a voting tool and a CMS. I even built some of it using Rails, which introduced some complexity. It turned out that we could build a much simpler, static version in Bridgetown and Airtable to validate the idea. If it works, there will always be time to improve it later. If it doesn’t, then the tech stack won’t matter.
The next step is getting real-world feedback, and experimenting with alternating between coding and marketing each week to keep the momentum going.