Matt Mullenweg wrote a great post on shipping. He writes:

Usage is like oxygen for ideas. You can never fully anticipate how an audience is going to react to something you’ve created until it’s out there. That means every moment you’re working on something without it being in the public it’s actually dying, deprived of the oxygen of the real world….

By shipping early and often you have the unique competitive advantage of hearing from real people what they think of your work, which in best case helps you anticipate market direction, and in worst case gives you a few people rooting for you that you can email when your team pivots to a new idea. Nothing can recreate the crucible of real usage.

I learned this last year on a creative writing project. Tired of pushing the same story ideas around my desk, I decided the best way to make some real progress was to go big and go public. I pledged to brainstorm one movie idea per weekday for an entire year. To help keep me motivated and judge the quality of my work, I built a blog to showcase my ideas and invited a group of friends and associates to follow along, vote on their favorites and spitball the ideas. It was a great success. By the end of the year, I brainstormed over 240 movie ideas, regularly got a 30% response rate on my mailing list and received over 600 comments on my website.

This year, I learned that before you ship, sometimes progress is simply a matter of starting even when you can’t see the finish line.

Coming off last year’s success, I wanted to keep the momentum going this year. I narrowed my list down to twelve ideas and invited the group back to follow along while I outlined one a month for the entire year. Unfortunately, between a heavier freelance workload and a new baby in the house, my creative writing time has been minimized. Determine to do justice to the ideas, four weeks per outline became five (costing me two outlines) and delays and a short break cost me another two.

Still, I’ve accomplished a lot with minimal resources. Eight outlines is a lot more than I had written in previous years. In hindsight, I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. Step-by-step, though, I often felt the opposite. Sometimes when I sat down to right it was all I could do to come up with the next question, forget the answer. But half steps add up. It’s important to ship, but along the way it’s better to take a half step than no step at all.

Matt Mullenweg’s 1.0 Is the Loneliest Number