Ask HN: How do I get over the fear of launching?

2 points by 8bithero 5 years ago | 3 comments

For what now feels like an eternity, I've been working on my personal project. I've spent an insane amount of time and effort on it. I've built a number of features and I finally have a design I'm happy with. I think it's fair to say "I have a working MVP"... But I seem to have this fear of reaching out to people.

Despite having a basic set of features that make it usable, there are still a ton more that I feel would make it "more complete". So I convince myself "I'll just add this extra feature/design tweak and then I'll try reaching out" and I never do because I always find the next thing that "needs to be done".

My app is in the menswear space - I built it as a tool to help me experiment with matching clothes and finding new combinations for clothes I already owned. I know a good avenue would be to reach out to fashion bloggers and see what they think of it. However, knowing there are still a lot of features I want to add, I keep talking myself out of it. I have a fear that if I reach out and they don't like it I may burn that bridge.

I have reached out to a few people who came back with positive feedback along the lines "It looks really good and could be useful" but I know in order for it to be truly useful there needs to be a bit of a community to share creations. So not quite sure how to follow up from there. I'm worried if I ask them to create content and there aren't other users to interact, they might try it once and then abandon it.

I guess this post is a shot in the dark to try figure out if fears of "burnt bridges" are legitimate concerns and if anyone else has had this fear of launching and how they managed to overcome it. Regarding building a community, I could create fake content and "fake it till I make it", but that feels slightly disingenuous and I'm worried this will be another "just one more feature" trap.

I've struggled with this for a while, so really hoping someone might have some good advice they'd be willing to share:)

trcarney 5 years ago |

If you are really worried about burning bridges by sending the product out too early, which I don't think will happen, make a list of all the fashion bloggers you would like to reach out to, rank them, and only send it to the bottom 3. That way if you burn those bridges, you don't really lose much. Another thing that could help is to say "this is the initial version, I plan on adding the following features..." That way you temper expectations and potentially get them excited for what is to come.

Something that helps me with stuff like this, comes from "The 4 Hour Work Week". Think through the worst case scenario. Truly go through what the consequences would be in your head. You will usually find the worst case isn't really that bad and your a getting worked up about something that will probably only end up being a minor setback.

goatcode 5 years ago |

>in order for it to be truly useful there needs to be a bit of a community to share creations

Could you explain the reason this is so?

8bithero 5 years ago | |

Again, this might just be in my head, but the basic concept is that users create "capsules collections" that are a collection of clothes based on an occasion, where any item in the capsule could be swapped to create a new outfit, in the knowledge that each combination will match (to varying degrees). Then other users can like a combination, and it becomes clear which is the best outfit according to the community... I wanted to extend this later to allow users to search for capsules or outfits that contained items they have added to their wardrobe.