I think it’s important to set deadlines for teams. It helps to focus everyone on a common goal; without a deadline, things tend to slip. When you’re burning through cash each month, slipping isn’t a luxury you can afford.
So we set ourselves a deadline of 6.30pm on June 12 and stuck a big countdown ticker in the middle of the screen so no one could miss when we went live. We organised a party of friends and investors in our office to celebrate the big moment.
At 6.15pm, we had a call from a lawyer saying that – for various boring reasons I won’t go into – we couldn’t go live until 9.30pm: Very frustrating for a team who had worked day and night for two months preparing for this time! This was just the start.
My frustration over what happened next is half because I’m a non-tech building a tech company and half because, despite it all, I’m a perfectionist.
Mistakes upset me. As a non-tech person, I struggle to comprehend the immense amount of complex programming that goes behind creating a software platform like Posse.
I just see the end result and am frustrated when things go wrong: Links don’t go where you expect; UI interactions that you think are going to make sense, don’t; grammatical mistakes in the copy. And so on.
Our team built the site you see today in two-and-a-half months and we put ourselves under enormous pressure to get it out, so we could learn how people use it and make improvements. As such, we released a minimum viable product rather than a perfect one.
But I can’t help it – I want a perfect product!
Late on the launch night, I noticed a hyphen out of place on the “about us” page, and that Facebook Share didn’t work if you were on Safari. I lay in bed fretting about these things and lost at least half a night’s sleep.
It’s even more frustrating because, not being technical, I don’t know how to fix those things. I don’t understand how hard it is to avoid these pitfalls, so my tech team gets frustrated with my frustrations.
I’ve learnt in the past couple of weeks that moving fast is more important than being perfect. Our head of engineering, Alex, pointed out a Mark Zuckerberg quote, “Move fast and break things. Unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” It makes a lot of sense.
Every week our site will improve, but there will always be mistakes along the road.
