Is releasing early ever a bad idea?

Whether you're a startup or established company, I would say "no" for games-related products, but that hasn't seemed to stop Microsoft.

In one word: Cuil.

How would you rate their chances now that they established themselves as a high-profile failure?

Don't release early unless the features you release are really polished. I never used Flock because it crashed when I tried it first.

Google didn't release Chrome till it was good enough to be released. This, from a company which completely believes in releasing early! Of course Chrome is still beta, but there's a world of difference between "Google releases another mediocre product" and "Chrome is amazing!"

The idea of "release early" is to get early feedback from a customer. In the context of games, you may want to present the idea of the game or some screenshots to a small circle of gamers to get their feedback about if the idea is funny enough. It probably does not make sense to release more than one version of a game, except your game is evolving permantently with new levels, new creatures, new ideas.

Releasing early doesn't mean releasing crappy software-- it means trimming your feature-set down to be as lean as possible while still offering some value.

That's a starting point that can help you learn about what makes your users tick.

For a game, I don't know how this applies. If you know your game isn't fun, I don't think you should release it. If you aren't sure if your game is fun ENOUGH, I think you should.

FWIW, "releasing" isn't all-or-nothing. Start by releasing to 10 friends. Then 100 strangers. Then 1000 strangers.

> So, if your startup is games based should you still release early?

No. DAOC had a great launch and continues to be fairly popular. Vanguard had an AWFUL launch and will likely never really recover.

The "release early" people are advising a black/white solution to something that is very 'gray'. What they mean is don't spend years on your app and then only release it when it's 100% perfect.

My advice? Don't let perfect ruin good (see DNF).

working on a startup is like working on a recipe for cake. bake your cakes, let people try them, adjust and add to the recipe, and then bake another cake. the point isn't the cake itself, the point is the recipe.

so, get your recipe together and bake a cake. maybe to start its just a plain, vanilla, one-layer, only bread cake. you bake it and give it to people to try. if you give it to people to try before you bake it, they're eating raw batter and will get salmonella poisoning and die. if the people like the plain cake, now add some frosting or some berries or another layer. if they don't like it, fix it.

i'm hungry

Releasing early needn't be the same thing as promoting early.

But every case is a special case. In the case of a game, you might want to get it in front of someone who isn't a developer as early as you can, but that doesn't mean you want to spoil your big marketing splash with a long, slow public beta. This is what roommates are for!

We're launching a slinkset site next week, thought I'd post to HN and ask people the important question: amidoinitrite?

We looked at just putting it out but thought we'd try and build up a community first through a beta programme. We've had some good feedback but to be fair our choice of beta users wasn't very good. We could've easily have ditched 25 of our 30 beta users and had the same amount of activity.

What we did get from those remaining 5 was all the delicious feedback we could lay our hands on, some of which we've passed on to slinkset.

I've also written to a number of key bloggers in the niche we're working in to promote the site, hopefully you'll see some noise. Slinkset have also been very supportive.

I think if we'd have just thrown it out then it'd have been stillborn. I think the fundamental thing is to have something functional 'enough' and to have some users when you start, then go for the launch. What do others think?

Absolutely. First looks do matter and people will be less inclined to check your site out again if their first experience was awful.

An even bigger issue is that if you're entering a crowded market, you'll be signaling to your competition what your approach and features will be. If you've developed something that's not magnitude better, you will be copied and if they have resources, they will outmaneuver you.

I'd suggest people read some of the Michael Porter books on this.

If it's a web site, I'd suggest that you launch the smallest high-quality product you can, and then tweak or add something every day until it's where you want it to be. You'll change track along the way, but that's OK because you'll do it based on real user behavior.

I launched Planaroo.com on June 30, and I wish I had launched it two months earlier. Many of my assumptions about how people would use the site were just plain wrong. I spent a long time working on features that few people use, and not enough time on features that a lot of people use.

If your site involves user-generated content, you have no idea how long it will take to ramp up. If your has lots of text, you just won't know how it will do in search for weeks after launch. Planaroo did very well in Google search almost immediately, but it still doesn't show up in Yahoo Search after 10 weeks.

One less cool feature doesn't mattter. Take it from Chrome: "we want this product to be ROCK SOLID"