The fact is that your product sucks. Just accept it and improve it.

Most of your projects will be crappy. You just have to accept it so you can improve it incrementally. I am learning this first hand as I started mine a few month ago. I went on and checked the competition and was dissatisfied with theie services (note that this is what everyone say about their competitors). So I built a tool that provide the exact same result, but for a much lower price. I got a few sign-ups and then it became a ghost town. How did it happen? Well my theory is I built something just for myself.

Having a service that works in testing environment is not so hard. When you ship it, the real work start. If you don't have a good error handling in place to notify you every time something goes wrong you are missing out. For example: I tried using my payment system only on test mode and was satisfied. Turns out I had an error occurring in live mode, it silently failed and neither the user nor I were notified of the error. How many customers I lost because of this, I will never know.

Analytics data is useless if you don't take action on it. The main reason i was using it was just to check page views and it is easy to lose sight when you are just focusing on the numbers. I was just excited to see large numbers on some page and viewed it as a success without making any connection with the number of sign-ups I was getting. When I did realize that sign-ups were not increasing anymore I quickly got bored of looking at my analytics. I actually introduced a bug the removed my tracking code from my pages by mistakes, so I have a good 20 days of blackout. Thank God for Apache logs though.

Another thing is, I designed this website so I know exactly where everything is. You wanna add a new website? Easy:

• Just click on My Account
• go to My Websites
• click on Add website
• enter the URL
• click Add
• add the code on your page to confirm it is your website
• and click on the Validate button.

Now this is sounds easy, but I had a friend test it and she struggled to find My Account. At some point, she asked, "what are we trying to accomplish here?"

These are just a few of the issues I am discovering everyday. On my launch day I was very excited. I thoroughly tested every feature and it worked just fine. I thought I beat the odds and created a good software from the start. But my software sucks so much it's not even funny.

I am not just complaining about all this. The main reason I am talking about it is because everything may suck at the beginning, you just have to learn from it, and keep jabbing, and jabbing until you suck less. Since I can only learn from my own mistakes I just have to keep going. It is not an excuse to give up.

Your projects may fail, but You, my friend, can only fail when you stop trying.

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