Relatedly, one piece of advice that 37Signals had in their Getting Real book that really helped me is that you can delay building many systems past launch.
For example, BCC has a substantial amount of functionality in the back-end interface so that I can handle common support tasks. AR has virtually nothing -- a single page which lists customer email addresses, trial statuses, and upcoming subscription renewal dates. I could have spent 2 weeks on building out a decent amount of functionality for CS and more advanced statistical navel gazing, but a) I might not pick the right stuff and b) it would mean that the release of the next feature that actually sells software would be on 3/15 instead of 3/1.
BCC has organically grown its backend over the years, as I get so frustrated with fixing the same issue manually that I make a one-button way to do it.
Well said. I launched S3stat as a paid service without any way of processing credit cards. Since I offered a 30 Day Free Trial, that gave me at least 3 weeks in which to build it (and some good incentive to do so).
FairTutor will probably go live with no way to review teachers. Same reason.
For example, BCC has a substantial amount of functionality in the back-end interface so that I can handle common support tasks. AR has virtually nothing -- a single page which lists customer email addresses, trial statuses, and upcoming subscription renewal dates. I could have spent 2 weeks on building out a decent amount of functionality for CS and more advanced statistical navel gazing, but a) I might not pick the right stuff and b) it would mean that the release of the next feature that actually sells software would be on 3/15 instead of 3/1.
BCC has organically grown its backend over the years, as I get so frustrated with fixing the same issue manually that I make a one-button way to do it.