"Not ready yet" sounds responsible. Mature. Quality-driven.
Most of the time, it's fear with better vocabulary.
As long as work isn't shipped, it can't be judged. Or rejected. Or shown to be wrong.
Unfinished work is safe. It lives in potential, where it's always almost great.
But potential doesn't teach you anything. Only contact with reality does.
What Shipping Actually Does
Shipping isn't a finish line. It's a sensor.
The moment something exists in the world—used by someone other than you, running somewhere other than your machine—you start learning things you couldn't learn in isolation.
Reality gives you:
- Feedback you didn't think to ask for
- Constraints you didn't know mattered
- Proof of what users ignore vs. what they actually need
- Evidence of which problems were real and which were imaginary
You don't get this in your head. You get it when something breaks in the wild. When someone uses a feature wrong. When the thing you spent weeks on gets ignored and the thing you almost cut becomes essential.
Shipping is how you find out what you don't know. Polishing in private just makes you more confident about your assumptions.
Redefining "Good Enough"
"Good enough" has a reputation problem. It sounds like settling. Like lazy. Like you couldn't be bothered to do it right.
That's not what it means.
Good enough means:
- Solves the core problem, end to end
- Doesn't lie about what it does
- Fails in understandable ways
- Can be iterated without starting over
Good enough is the minimum version that can teach you something real. Anything less is sloppy—you're shipping something that can't even generate useful feedback. Anything more is often avoidance—you're polishing instead of learning.
The goal isn't to ship garbage. The goal is to stop confusing "complete" with "ready to learn from."
This only works if you're paying attention. Shipping early doesn't replace judgment—it accelerates it. You still have to watch what happens, notice what breaks, and act on what you learn. Sloppy people ship garbage and learn nothing because they're not looking. That's not shipping early. That's just failing in public.
Shipped Early, Learned Fast
Most of my tools and sites launched incomplete. Not broken—but obviously unfinished. Missing features. Rough edges. Explanations that assumed too much.
I shipped anyway.
What I learned, almost immediately:
- Which features no one touched
- Where people got confused
- Which problems I'd invented and which ones were real
- What I actually cared enough to maintain
No amount of internal refinement would have shown me that. I would have kept polishing things that didn't matter while ignoring gaps I couldn't see.
Shipping early taught me what not to build next. That's the highest-leverage lesson there is.
Some of those tools still exist. Some were abandoned for good reasons I couldn't see until they shipped.
Held Too Long, Paid the Price
I've also made the opposite mistake.
Earlier writing stayed in drafts longer than it needed to. I over-polished tone, structure, framing—not because it wasn't good, but because I wanted it to be right.
The cost:
- Lost momentum
- Delayed feedback
- Learned later than I could have what actually resonated
The insight didn't come from refinement. It came once the work escaped me. Once it was out, I could see it clearly—what landed, what didn't, what I'd been protecting for no reason.
That's a pattern I now recognize faster. The urge to "just one more pass" is usually the urge to stay safe.
The Real Risk
The risk isn't shipping something imperfect.
The risk is building a perfect version of the wrong thing. Or building nothing at all. Or spending months on a project that teaches you nothing because it never left your head.
Projects that stay unfinished don't fail. They also don't teach. They just sit there, accumulating potential that never converts to knowledge.
The graveyard of unshipped work is full of things that would have been fine. Not perfect—but fine. Good enough to learn from. Good enough to improve. Good enough to matter.
They didn't ship because "not ready yet" felt safer than being wrong in public.
The Discipline
Shipping early isn't reckless. It's disciplined—if you're honest about what you're shipping and why.
The heuristic I use:
- Does it solve one real problem, end to end? Not ten problems. One.
- Can someone else use it without me explaining it? If it requires a walkthrough, it's not ready.
- If it breaks, will I learn something useful? Failure should be informative, not just embarrassing.
- Can I improve it without throwing it away? The architecture has to survive iteration.
If the answers are mostly yes—ship it.
One more rule: be honest about what you shipped. No pretending a prototype is a product. No marketing theater. If it's early, say it's early. That's not weakness—it's integrity. It also sets expectations that let you learn without backlash.
The Standard
You're not chasing completeness. You're chasing learning per unit time.
A shipped version—imperfect, exposed, real—teaches faster than any amount of polishing in private. The feedback is better. The pressure is real. The lessons stick.
The version that exists beats the version that's perfect.
Ship before you're ready. You'll be ready faster—and you'll become someone who ships, which matters more than any single project.