You’re reading Signal vs. Noise, a publication about the web by 37signals since 1999.

That’s great. I just met with a startup yesterday who were joking about what their site looked like when they first launched.

It’s funny when you can look back at what started it all and cringe.

I like it! Yes, very embarrasing.

Haha. I am creating something embarrassing as we speak!

Ha! Couldn’t have said it better myself.

So true.

However, it seems no matter how good a design is I get tired of it over time.

I know you guys put up quotes that you might not necessarily agree with but are thought provoking. And I’m curious about this one. How soon is this “review”, 1 week after launch or 6 months?

We can all look back on stuff we first designed and developed and see we’ve come so far in our style and tastes. But you guys seem to put enough polish on early releases, do you guys launch something if your at all embarrassed in that moment about a piece of that something?

That seems to be the benefit of focusing on half a product. Don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on adding feature bulk, but then spend a lot of that saved time on polish.

Excellent article on learning from your failures.

@Ben i think you might have missed the point, haha

this keeps with the same paradigm of avoiding “planning paralysis”, i always run into that when i’m coding something new

We’ve looked back through the first sites that we did and track how we improved over time. I think it’s more important to track how you’ve improved than cringe at how bad you were in the past.

The point here is that if your first release is perfect, then you are likely to have wasted a lot of time on it; whereas you could have gotten to the same result after several iterations, and that would have cost less.

While I get the point (sort of), the idea that being embarrassed about your web site (1st or 50th) is a good thing…or NOT feeling embarrassment is a BAD thing… is pretty ridiculous.

We all look at things we did a long time ago and have a laugh, but this comment suggests that laughable is OK…even necessary.

Great quote, and probably the only valuable insight to take from that article.

Failure is overrated, as it`s the saying here.

This quote has completely altered the way I work (just in the past week). I feel like I have actually produced more work. Combine this quote with GTD and Boom!