No Place for a Perfectionist in a Web Startup
12.27.2007 | Inspiration, Programming
10 years ago if you had asked, “If you could only use one word to describe yourself, what would it be?” I would have said, “perfectionist.” Granted, whether I was one or not was debatable. However, if I only had one word and I was trying to sell myself, why not be perfect?
Perfection was fine great in the old world. Press releases had to be perfect. Products have to be perfect. Corporations had to be perfect. Websites had to be perfect… everything around us apparently had one chance for a first impression and it had to be perfect.
However, things have changed…
In a society where very few people use spell checkers and everyone can publish themselves on the web, things are hardly ever perfect. In fact, people seem to find things more newsworthy and are more sympathetic when imperfection is shared with the public.
Which one do you remember more?
1. Martha Stewart day-to-day or Martha Stewart in jail?
2. What Tom’s doing with MySpace right now or how Mark Zuckerberg is f-in up yet another new Facebook feature launch?
Which one do you sympathize or care more about?
1. Superman or Clark Kent?
2. Batman or Spider-man?
The public’s fascination with screw ups and seeing how they fix themselves can itself be a marketing gimmick. There’s a reason why Facebook is always in the news and it’s not because they’re the perfect company out there. Google on the other hand… that’s questionable.
For startups, waiting for perfection can lead to its doom. This happened with my first website that was centered around college nightlife. We had a great domain name, great design and an unbelievable product for its time. I teamed up with a couple of friends and like most dorm startups, we got cranking on the code like we had dropped all our classes.
We had coded image galleries from the ground up (a year before any major image gallery platforms), message forums from the ground up (emulating vBulletin and more) and an online bartender as a cool to have feature. I remember doing data entry for the online bar, taking pictures of various shots (and drinking them); THAT was fun.
While all these neat features were great and would have made an amazing website, in my eyes they were never ready for launch because some features were always missing from my master plan or some bugs were out there waiting to crash my system. Imperfection came with the territory for self written code and for the most part, the site was simply not ready for the public.
During the development and debugging time, my technical knowledge excelled, however my business sense or lack thereof completely failed me. My team of developers and QA found bugs left and right and we were hacking the site in ways most normal users would not have done. Because we were such geeks, we were busy fixing errors or bugs that probably wouldn’t have made a big difference in the overall scheme of things. As a result, we never really launched and we were passed by other entrepreneurs at the school who simply bought a prefabricated community software, change some colors and focused on marketing the site instead of writing code. I believe they launched in a week what took us over 5 months to write up.
Waiting for perfection can be deadly and that was a rude awakening.
Now-a-days, I no longer seek the perfect launch when doing web startups and I actually cringe when I hear others looking to repeat my mistakes. Delaying the launch for a few months to get a more perfect site out there will not necessarily make your business better. A good business is a good business — a good website does not make a good business.
Perfectionists really have no place in a web startup, at least not in the early stages. If you have one on your team, make sure you all get on the same page focusing on the launch; the tweaks can come later.
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