Just Fucking Ship It
Ideas are fundamental to the concept of change, but by themselves they are next to meaningless. An idea without some form of implementation doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t demonstrate how things could change, it doesn’t mean anything.
It doesn’t need to be this way, turning an idea into something tangible can be relatively quick, and the rewards for doing so can be immense. It allows you to test the idea, and determine its worth. It can weed out the bad ideas and help improve the good ones.
This is something that Chris Murphy, Kyle Gawley, and myself have done with Get Invited. We quickly built it up and used it earlier in the year for the University of Ulster’s Festival of Art & Design, encompassing a whopping 23 events.
It was something of a trial by fire for the service, and for us, but it ultimately demonstrated the viability of our product, and was a sign that we were onto something. The project was able to progress as a result, rather than remaining an idea.
Without pushing ourselves to take our idea and make it real, we wouldn’t have a product, and we wouldn’t be ticketing for next week’s Refresh Belfast. How did we get here? By not trying to be perfect before shipping.
Perfection is an Impossible Goal
It’s impossible to create the perfect product. Perfect for what? Perfect for who? You can’t please everybody, so you need to identify a market and work towards perfection for it. You aren’t working to achieve perfection, but it helps provide direction.
Get Invited is designed to bring ticketing back to its very core. Getting tickets from the hands of you, an event organiser, into the hands of people that want to attend your events. No clutter, and no barriers.
This allowed us to strip away a lot of what other event organisers seem to be building in today, and to focus on the core of making ticketing great. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it doesn’t ask for all of the personal details of your life. We started with the basics.
Good Enough is Good to Go
Get Invited isn’t finished, it’s not all we plan for it to be. It certainly wasn’t when we first shipped it. What we shipped was very much a Minimum Viable Product, but that comes with a couple of key benefits:
- It makes the project real.
- It gets you feedback.
The former is a psychological thing, it lets you know that you’ve made something, because it’s out there in the wild. The latter is much more important, it will let you know if what you’ve made is worth continuing. Having that conversation early can be a major time saver. If your project is a dud, you can stop there and invest your time in other projects.
Shipping a project will get you feedback that will help you improve what you’re working on. That’s right, improving. Once you’ve pushed a project live it doesn’t just sit idly, it adapts and grows. Sometimes this is based on user feedback, but often times it’s based upon internal decisions to improve or tweak aspects of what you are working on. These changes wouldn’t be possible without shipping for two reasons:
- You’d have no feedback.
- You’re guessing how your project will be used.
You can’t make changes based on user feedback if you don’t have any users. You simply can’t. If you’re working on a service, such as Get Invited, you also cannot know exactly how people will use your product.
An example of this happened with Refresh Belfast this week. Their event title made use of some quotes, and when it went live we all realised that it would be much nicer if they were converted to ‘Smart Quotes’ rather than the standard quotations around the text.
It is unlikely we would have encountered this issue without actual usage of Get Invited, and it has helped us to improve the service (and also my portfolio, expect a post on the code in the near future) as a result.
Shipping Makes It Tangible
This is all a long winded way of saying that if you don’t ship your idea, then the idea doesn’t mean anything. An idea is intangible, you can’t hold it and you can’t demonstrate it. It’s harder to improve something you can’t see. Pinning it down and building it makes it a tangible, real, thing.
There are people who are blessed with brilliant ideas, and gifted with the ability and the technology to be able share their ideas with a global audience. For some people it takes them a while to realise the benefits of getting things out there, but once they do they’re finally able to create their ideas, make them real, and share them with the world.
Don’t bottle your ideas up. Just. Fucking. Ship. It.
Credits
The image used at the beginning of this article is taken from Andrew Power’s Dribbble shot of a poster design, Real Artists Ship, which he made available as a wallpaper for download. His work is awesome, you should check it out.