Release quick, release often

While building Listypedia about a year back the initial feature set was huge. It was two of us working on it, me working on frontend + backend and one friend working on backend. We decided on a feature set that it will have public lists, private lists, like/unlike items added to a list, comments on individual items added to the list, like/unlike lists, share lists, blah blah blah the list goes on. We never really did significant research on what people really want and we were adding features one by one on our own.

As we were building it, we talked to a few friends about what did they think about a feature x, how important it is for them to have that feature and for most of the features that we had added or planning to add they said that they would be okay with not having for v0.1. After listening to this we realized that rather than building everything together and then realeasing it, it is better to just release step by step. You gain two things doing this:

1. Get feedback on features that you have developed
2. Find bugs early and fix them before they are exposed to a bigger audience.

(2) is really important. IMHO it is better to have n features which work as advertised then having n+2 features with some features broken and not working as expected. Following this, we started with a bare minimum version and then gradually added features one by one with each feature in solid shape. Release quick, release often \m/