Sparkyl

When you are a solo founder, it is easy to keep adding features and never launch. Having a community where people ask "did you ship yet?" every week creates healthy pressure. I committed to a launch date in the community chat and that external accountability was the difference between shipping in 4 months versus endlessly tweaking.

Talk to users before you write code. I almost built three features nobody wanted because they sounded cool to me. My advisor forced me to interview 20 potential users before writing a line of code. Only 2 of my planned features resonated — the other 3 were things I never would have thought of. That user research saved weeks of wasted development.

Your first version should embarrass you a little. If it does not, you waited too long to launch. Ship the smallest version that delivers core value, then iterate based on real usage data. My App Store launch had one core feature — and that one feature is what users actually love. Everything else I planned to build on day one would have been noise.