This post by Jeff Atwood (“Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway“) affirms why letting go of perfectionism is a must if you’re ever going to launch the site, get your feet wet, swallow your pride and start learning from your users:
The velocity and responsiveness of your team to user feedback will set the tone for your software, far more than any single release ever could. That’s what you need to get good at. Not the platonic ideal of shipping mythical, perfect software, but being responsive to your users, to your customers, and demonstrating that through the act of continually improving and refining your software based on their feedback. So to the extent that you’re optimizing for near-perfect software releases, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.
There’s no question that, for whatever time budget you have, you will end up with better software by releasing as early as practically possible, and then spending the rest of your time iterating rapidly based on real world feedback.
