Side project, nights and weekends, and my launch date has now slipped three times — each slip individually reasonable, each one about six weeks. I don't think I'm lazy, I think I have no method for picking a date that means anything. What do people actually do to set a first date that survives contact with a real week?
My actual numbers across three projects: estimated six weeks, took nineteen. Estimated three months, took seven. Third one I committed to a demo date five weeks out in front of people, cut roughly half the planned features, and shipped on the day. The multiplier on my own estimates is somewhere near three, consistently, and I've stopped trying to become a better estimator — I now assume the three and choose what to cut in advance rather than discovering it in month five.
The date isn't your problem, the scope is, and dates slip because scope is allowed to be vague. Try this instead: write the release notes for version one first, in past tense, on a single screen with nothing scrolling off the bottom. Then delete lines until you'd be comfortable showing it to someone whose opinion you fear slightly. The earliest possible date is the day you're actually willing to delete things, and it's usually much sooner than the date you keep picking.
Writing the changelog first reframed the whole thing for me. It's much harder to justify a feature when you have to write the sentence a stranger will read about it.
The way I got this wrong was setting a hard ultimatum date and then honouring it at any cost — I shipped to my whole list of about 300 with a signup flow that broke on any email address containing a plus sign. Roughly a fifth of the people who tried it never got in, and the apology email got a much worse response than a delay would have. Set the date, but ship to five people first and let them be the ones who find the thing you didn't test.
Put a person in the date, write the changelog first, cut until it fits. Then ship it to five people, not three hundred.
@tiny_launch_tess · 4mo ago · 2 replies
Pick a date that has another human being in it. A meetup where you've asked for five minutes, a friend's calendar invite for a Thursday demo, a newsletter slot someone else controls — anything where sliding costs you a conversation rather than a private sigh. My first three self-imposed dates all moved and the first one with someone else's Thursday attached did not, and it wasn't willpower, it was that I couldn't quietly renegotiate with myself at 11pm.
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@indent_error_ivy · 4mo ago
Booking the demo before the thing works feels insane and it's the single most effective thing I've done. The week before is unpleasant and the week after exists, which the previous nine months of weeks did not.
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