Ship it

Today, I was reminded (not for the first time) how important it is to actually ship the stuff you're building.

https://twitter.com/sinequanonh/status/1178683823699234816

3 weeks. That is what it took.

Like many developers, I dream of bootstrapping a successful side-project into something profitable. Like many developers, too, I have started several side-projects with the idea that this will be the one. It typically goes like this:

  • Dream of cool product
  • Consider how easy it seems to build it
  • Register a domain, because obviously that is the most important step 🙄
  • Start programming
  • Change frameworks at least two times
  • Somewhere down the line, stop programming
  • ... and never ship 😕

QuickMetrics.io seems like a really nice product. It basically allows you to capture metrics from different sources, be it a plain cURL request or a Node-script. What is so nice about it is that is is so darn easy to get started and integrate it in your own projects. It comes with a really snappy dashboard creator as well.

Maybe I am a bit biased, because this product could have come straight out of one of my dreams.

A year or two back, I started working on a project with pretty much the same goal as QuickMetrics:

  • Allow metrics to be captured as easily as possible
  • Aggregate metrics into dashboards
  • Require as little programming skills as possible to integrate it

Obviously, I needed a domain (again, super important 🙄), so I registered metriq.io because I thought it was a cool name. ( I don't own the domain anymore. )

I started programming. Even made a quick draft of an interactive product page that allowed you to test the service without even logging in.

Metriq.io in all its crappy glory
Metriq.io in all its crappy glory

I just forgot to do one thing: ship it.

In the end, Metriq.io died before I even launched it. It basically was a product-page with a really simple API. In retrospect, I probably could have shipped it in that state to collect feedback, but I didn't.

This post functions as a reminder for myself and others to ship the things that you build.** If that idea you are having is really so good, people will start noticing it, even with its flaws. Just ship it, before someone else does it for you.

I have a lot of respect for LÊo and Felix for shipping QuickMetrics. Congratulations on launching it. I hope it will become a better product than I could ever have dreamed of 🤗