The BBB gives Uber an "F" rating based on a handful of complaints? Uber serves over a million users a month! And I'd guess most of their customers are repeat - one sign that customers are happy with the service.
If it's a software product, and you're debating whether it's time to release, it's probably time to release.
If your customers try your product and quickly abandon it because of it's imperfections, you prioritize fixing those imperfections. If they complain a little, and a few of them leave after a while because they're fed up, it's probably worth fixing those imperfections at some point, but you may want to focus on other priorities.
What about the importance of the 'first impression'. This is an overwhelming concern for the PM of my current product, and going for that 'extra 10%' is causing many delays to launch.
So true. I think the sign of a great PM is the ability to see all the imperfections but the self-control to focus on the things that matter and to de-prioritize the things that don't.
It's easy to make a list of everything wrong with your product and spend eternity trying to fix it all. It's harder to reconcile imperfection with the reality of limited resources and business objectives.
Content has a way of their own. Appreciation never really reaches upto the perceived recognition.
Being in content game and UX occasionally gives in the same.
I also think the fact that you see all the imperfections in your product is what will eventually make the product not just good but great. The key though is to release early and release often. This allows things to get fixed faster, and get to where you want to be.
LedgerSMB has had one horrendously slow release (1.3). It was driven around the wrong priorities and tried to fix too much. The mistake nearly sunk my business. We learned our lesson and will continue to plan for significant but manageable releases in the future.
A big difference to whom? I don't think the author intended to imply something different by using that particular language.
I doubt the author consciously thought: "i'm going to make this apology less effective," so who cares if the language didn't exactly resonate with you or the OP? I don't think it was malicious or disingenuous; if anything, the NYT needs to hire better copywriters, so their emails don't get dissected as frequently.
Quick clarification: We're actually not really working on solving the problem of helping people "send" money. Our primary focus is making it dead simple for anybody to get-up and running, collecting/accepting payments online.
We think that collecting money is a bigger pain point and a larger market.
"Sending" money falls into two categories: P2P transfers and remittances. Remittance is a pretty large market, with old (Western Union) and new (Xoom) players alike. It's not very exciting to us, and it's a difficult business to break into.
P2P is a little sexier, but the pain point is not as high, people are incredibly sensitive to cost, and it's a problem that will be "absorbed" by the bigger companies (Amex/VISA now have solutions, PayPal offers it for free, your bank will offer it soon). It's more of a feature than a real business. I actually think Venmo has an awesome product and does a great job solving this problem, but I'm guessing that it'll be hard for them to build a big business on that alone.
We love the guys at Stripe, they have an awesome product. They provide a super simple gateway for developers. WePay provides super simple tools for anyone (mostly non-developers) to accept payments.
We LOVE to see innovation in user experience disrupting the payments industry from the likes of Square in mobile POS, Stripe for developers, BankSimple for checking accounts and WePay for SMBs & non-profits.
I should mention that we offer an API, but it's mostly for folks that want to allow their users to accept payment via their site (i.e. for marketplaces, fundraising tools, or event planning) - it's not really for recurring billing or merchant processing like Stripe. For more information, see wepay.com/developer
