How to stop abandoning your side-projects for new ideas

Stop adding “one more feature” and ship your product.

You have a great idea for a product and you get extremely excited about it.
You spend countless hours working on your idea.
Your roadmap grows instead of shrinking, you are not even halfway done.
Motivation starts to decline, you take a break and decide to continue a bit later.
A new, more exciting idea hits you and you cannot wait to get started.
You put your current project on hold to pursue this new shiny thing.

Does that sound a bit like you? It definitely sounds a lot like myself.

When we worked on the MVP for our app Avocation, we had a big roadmap with a ton of tasks that still had to be done. As the weeks passed we realized that if we wanted to finish everything we planned, it would take us many more months to release our app.

I struggled a lot with the decision to launch our unfinished app back then, but looking back I would even say that we could have launched much earlier. Why is it so important though to launch early and not spend too much time polishing your project?

Perfectionism: The silent killer of great ideas

A bit of perfectionism can help you to create a better solution than your competitors did. Aiming for perfection is not the problem, not finding the right balance is what makes it an obstacle.

Successful products are creative solutions to real problems.

Your perfectionism will not help you identify a real problem and this is as important to your success as your solution. You might end up creating a solution for a problem nobody has, or one that is not urgent enough for people to bother solving it.

Creating a product is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. If you put all your energy into the first 100 meters, you will not make it to the end.

You have to find the right balance with perfectionism. Don’t aim too high, especially in the beginning. If you set yourself unrealistic goals you most likely abandon your idea even before even giving it a real chance.

Nonetheless, you can have big goals, you even should!
What you have to learn is how to prioritize.

Introducing: MVP — Minimum viable product

If you don’t already have it written down, start with a big list of your planned features. You don’t need a task management tool, a pen and paper does the job too. Use whatever helps you to get work done.

Now you have to be honest with yourself: Which of those items on your list are not absolutely crucial for your product to get started? Mark all of those items.

You are not sure about one item? Then it’s most likely not crucial — mark it.

If you really can’t decide on a feature, ask someone else! In the best case this person should be someone you are building your product for, but even your friends can help you with a second opinion.

Always keep the risks of delaying the launch in your head:

• You are more likely to abandon the product
• Another competitor might arise while you are still perfecting your product
• You might go in a completely wrong direction because you couldn’t validate your problem

When is your MVP ready?

After you worked through all the tasks you marked as essential, you will probably ask yourself when is the right time to launch.

There will be a lot of problems that you would want to fix before showing the product to people, but most likely none of them are important enough to hold you back. Resist that urge and launch right away.

If your MVP doesn’t make you uncomfortable, you are too late

Let’s face the hard reality: your product will never feel finished or perfect for you. It’s something you will never achieve, not even spending 100 more hours or having a team of 100 people working with you.

Launch your MVP and validate your assumptions. The earlier you do that, the faster you can pivot in the right direction with your product.

After you launched I would recommend you to go through your list of unfinished tasks and group them into packages.

This will help you a lot with motivation, especially if there is still a lot to be done. Every time you finish one of your packages, you will feel like you completed something which gives a you little boost and makes it easier to stick to your plan.

Build, Launch, Test — Repeat

A few days after launch you will most likely already get some feedback. If not, make sure to ask your users for it! The feedback will probably change your plans and that’s good.

This is why it is so critical to launch early, before investing too much time and energy in the wrong direction. User feedback will validate your problem and help you to avoid wasting time on features with little or no impact on the user.

Instead, you can now implement features requested by your users!
This will massively boost the growth of your product.

Now the cycle of Build-Launch-Test begins. This a never-ending process. As you release updates, you confirm that the changes truly solve the problem. Never stop to asking your users for feedback and plan your updates accordingly.

Launching your MVP is never easy because there is no perfect moment for it.
After the launch your product is not even nearly done, it’s actually just a beginning of massive work ahead.

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