Hopefully you’ll interpret this as constructive criticism: perhaps you should have saved the publicity exercise of posting to HN till the time when you actually had this straight.
Truthfully, as another startup founder, I think now was a great time to post it.
I grew my last business to an awesome success. And one of my regrets, looking back, is that I didn't blog more about the process of getting it there. About all the hurdles we had and the missteps we took.
I look back fondly on the few blog posts where I did talk openly about what we were going through, in part because I am so proud of how far we came from those darker moments, and in part because I can remember what I was feeling then and re-absorb the lesson.
I think this is great. You should never hold back when you have something to share with a wider audience, but more importantly, to share with your future self.
He'll have plenty more chances to get on Hacker News in the future. This isn't a one-time opportunity. :) So blog, blog, blog!
We have this long thread, in which you have lots of people asking "what does this product actually do?" No one can figure it out from your pitch, either the original or your rewrite. People have been guessing at what this is like, and yet you haven't really clarified, you've just made excuses.
You have the opportunity to get exposure to thousands of hackers, entrepreneurs, and investors, right here on Hacker News. And yet, you haven't yet provided a compelling story that anyone can actually understand.
What does your product do? What problems does it solve? How is it better or suited to a different niche than many other tools (wikis, bugtrackers, Google Docs, email) that people already use?
I think what drupeek says applies to this as well. You can be working on something and not really know what it is. I wrote this app a quite ago, only took me about 5 days to write it because it was quite simple, but it’s been years since I finally understood what it was for.
In designing another system recently, I wrote down my entire thought process as it developed in the form of questions and answers to myself. When I read it back now I can see how I had this mixed up set of ideas and was actually quite confused. Then, as you read down, things start to become clearer and ideas become more developed. I guess it still has quite a long way to go as well because things certainly aren’t as clear as I would like them to be.
So the point I’m making is that definition and clarity can take as long, and sometimes--although I think this is infrequent--longer, than the software development.
As for the question of whether you should blog about it. I think it’s a difficult call. In a way you could say this story has wasted everyone’s time because I still have no idea what the app drupeek’s developing is about. But on the other hand we wouldn’t be having this conversation now were it not for it.
Interesting... how did you write an app without knowing what it is for? It seems very backwards to write an app (or create anything, really) and then later figure out what to use it for.
Well I wrote it with one thing in mind and when I finished it, it didn’t really help with that thing much. I was pretty sure it would be useful for other things though. Since then I’ve discovered a couple of other uses for it. I think this happens more when you write something that is very abstract as this is.
