Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out?

Posted by Jarred on Saturday March 05, 2011 @04:00AM
from the ask-hn dept.

I've been working On an idea since October, mostly alone but its been a slow yet quick-to-change process, but I feel that it's about time I get something out there. I'm really just wondering, how do people get these startups up in running in such a short time like a month or even two months?

I'm not sure if what I'm creating is more complex than most (it probably is) or if its that I'm essentially doing this alone with the exception of occasional questions that I ask one of my smarter friends about.

It could also be my work ethic, as during the week I have a maximum of 3-4 hours to work on it and eat dinner, and exercise for about an hour and a half and then shower & sleep

Most of my time is spent refining the idea, and the times when I got something working I quickly realized a much better way to approach it, and that has happened a few times. Should I just do it and slowly improve or continue this agonizingly slow process of refine, create and redo?

Or rather, how do I leverage the time I have to create a useful utility quickly?

( 8 comments | 3 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by jasonkester on Saturday March 05, 2011 @08:31AM (#2291447)

The key is to have built lots of stuff already.

Once you've launched a dozen sites (possibly for consulting clients or even old employers if you were careful with your contracts), you'll have a good set of tools built and lots of pieces that you can use to cobble together a new site in a hurry.

As an example, S3stat went from idea to launch in a weekend because the only thing I needed to build to make it work was the actual functionality of the product. The public site, its login system, user accounts, forums, CMS, admin backend, continuous build/deploy, and all the data access boilerplate were all torn out from other projects that I'd built over the years.

If I had to build all that stuff from scratch, it might have taken a couple months to have a good product site ready to compliment the comparatively tiny piece of code that is the actual functionality that people pay for.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by riskish on Saturday March 05, 2011 @09:47AM (#2291532)

Cool. Do you mind sharing how much s3stat pulls in?

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by jasonkester on Saturday March 05, 2011 @10:17AM (#2291588)

It took it a couple years to get to the point where it could pay my rent. Today, I could probably live off of what it brings in, but thankfully I don't have to.

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by riskish on Saturday March 05, 2011 @10:45AM (#2291628)

Cool. I like the idea, I wonder if there are other services that could use better display and benefit from a similar service. Are you working on versions for other platforms besides S3?

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by niktrix on Saturday March 05, 2011 @04:08AM (#2291146)

make website , use social networking , patch with any ad agency . Start with lots of ads to your targeted user.

Start small contest which relates to use of your product.

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by Jarred on Saturday March 05, 2011 @04:12AM (#2291153)

I wasn't referring to marketing... I literally meant out, as in released.

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by niktrix on Saturday March 05, 2011 @04:22AM (#2291169)

you need to do marketing only before release so that you can get good userbase.

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Re:Ask HN: How to quickly get a product out? by instakill on Saturday March 05, 2011 @07:18AM (#2291366)

Paid marketing, before a release? For a startup project? What crack are you smoking?

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