Done is better than perfect

Finally we’ve launched new naffy the next iteration of our product allowing to monetize knowledge, time, expertise and pretty much anything online. Coincidentally at the same time NASA had launched their Artemis 1 mission. Who knows maybe in future we’ll be selling tickets for space travels through naffy? That would be something.

I like to think about naffy as a solution rather than a tool. Sure you can achieve similar goals by selecting and gluing together several products but with naffy those tools are collaborating together - they are aware of each other and understand the context they’re operating in. They know who is the merchant and who is the customer. They know what other products merchant can offer and potentially cross or up sell those products. With such tight integration between tools our customers can achieve more with naffy than by using individual yet independent tools together.

Many would struggle to launch a product at such an early stage and wait until it’s more mature and feature rich so that it looks better compared to the competitors. The new naffy is missing many features we plan to add. We haven’t even ported all the features from the previous version making us unable, just yet, to move our current customers from the old to the new platform. Sure we could have waited to develop more things and postpone the launch. Yet this is not our style.

In naffy we believe that done is better than perfect. We believe that it’s better to have some solution rather than to wait for of a perfect one. Sure there is a bottom line that shouldn’t be crossed. Solution should be simple but not overly simplistic, too primitive or not functional, but once it can deliver a minimal value to the customers there’s no point in not releasing it. By doing that we can ask for feedback and check whether we’re moving towards a right direction.

In a lot of cases we’re intentionally dividing features into a simple, base solution and further improvements. Sometimes we do not even jump into developing improvements immediately, but rather wait and observe whether customers will ask for it. That way we’re getting a confirmation whether something is needed or not. With this tactic we can strip off our product from unneeded functionality and make it simpler for our customers. Nobody likes a bloated software where you only use 20% of it’s functionality and everything else just stands in your way. Knowing what to do is as important as knowing what is not worth doing.

In naffy we like to engage our customers in early stages. We’re encouraging them to check our ideas and let us know what they think, suggest improvements, report issues. We have a number of customers very committed into doing that. By releasing early and often we can get a lot of invaluable feedback and validate our assumptions without risking spending weeks or months on developing things that nobody wants. Some of our customers are so committed in helping us as they’d have been part of our development team.

We aren’t afraid of making mistakes or taking risks. There are probably just a handful decisions in life that can’t be reverted. We’ll keep releasing early and ask our customers for their opinion. At the end they’re the users of our product and they’re the best to ask for what they actually need. Maintaining a tight collaboration between naffy and our customers is one of our core values. We value opinions of our customers and it’s fantastic to have customers dedicating their time to help developing naffy. That assures us that we’re doing something valuable.