In typical 37signals fashion, the wisdom in these pages is edgy yet

Launch now
When is your product or service finished? When should you put it out on
the market? When is it safe to let people have it? Probably a lot sooner than
you're comfortable with. Once your product does what it needs to do, get it
out there.
Just because you've still got a list of things to do doesn't mean it's not
done. Don't hold everything else up because of a few leftovers. You can do
them later. And doing them later may mean doing them better, too.
Think about it this way: If you had to launch your business in two weeks,
what would you cut out? Funny how a question like that forces you to
focus. You suddenly realize there's a lot of stuff you don't need. And what
you do need seems obvious. When you impose a deadline, you gain clarity.
It's the best way to get to that gut instinct that tells you, "We don't need
this."
Put off anything you don't need for launch. Build the necessities now,
worry about the luxuries later. If you really think about it, there's a whole
lot you don't need on day one.
When we launched Basecamp, we didn't even have the ability to bill
customers! Because the product billed in monthly cycles, we knew we had a
thirty-day gap to figure it out. So we used the time before launch to solve
more urgent problems that actually mattered on day one. Day 30 could wait.
Camper, a brand of shoes, opened a store in San Francisco before
construction was even finished and called it a Walk in Progress. Customers
could draw on the walls of the empty store. Camper displayed shoes on
cheap plywood laid over dozens of shoe boxes. The most popular message
written by customers on the walls: "Keep the store just the way it is."
*
Likewise, the founders of Crate and Barrel didn't wait to build fancy
displays when they opened their first store. They turned over the crates and
barrels that the merchandise came in and stacked products on top of them.
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Don't mistake this approach for skimping on quality, either. You still
want to make something great. This approach just recognizes that the best
way to get there is through iterations. Stop imagining what's going to work.
Find out for real.

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*
Walt Stanchfield, Drawn to Life: 20 Golden Years of Disney Master
Classes, vol. 1, The Walt Stanchfield Lectures, Oxford, UK: Focal Press,
2009.
*
Pasolivo Olive Oil, Zingerman's, 
www.zingermans.com/product.aspx?
productid=o-psl
*
"About Kingsford: Simply a Matter of Taste," Kingsford,
www.kingsford.com/about/index.htm
*
Fara Warner, "Walk in Progress," Fast Company, Dec. 19, 2007,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/58/lookfeel.html
+
Matt Valley, "The Crate and Barrel Story," Retail Traffic, June 1, 2001,
retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_crate_barrel_story

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