internshipin

At last, internshipIN is now open to students and employers. Yay! In a nutshell, internshipIN is bridging the gap between two groups of people hungry to get to know each other with no true other way to connect. TechCrunch even wrote about us earlier this afternoon, which helped bring in some early traffic.

Now for the more relevant question… Why did it take me so long to launch internshipIN to the world? Why did I hesitate on pressing the “launch” button?

1) Because I haven’t yet learned how to follow my own advice.
2) Because my friends and colleagues think that it’s important to have a solid product before having people look at it.
3) Because there were serious bugs that needed fixing.

But I came to my senses… the product will never be perfect, and it will always have serious bugs that need fixing. I though to myself, “what the heck…” if people don’t like internshipIN, it doesn’t matter. I’d remind myself that it was a good learning experience, and that I’d do better on my next pet-project. In the meanwhile, I can ask for my users’ feedback and figure out ways to improve the service.

It took a few nights to get a quick and dirty prototype together, and I shouldn’t have hesitated to launch the service. There are two main reasons for launching early (and often): 1) Gathering user feedback and 2) What I like to call “Failure-Prevention-Testing.”

First off, gathering user feedback is pretty straightforward. You communicate with your users and figure out what they like and what they recommend you add/change/remove from your site. In just the first day alone, I’ve received dozens of emails from people who sent in bug reports and feature requests. I love it!

Now for the more important reason to launch early: Failure-Prevention-Testing. In a nutshell, this “testing” allows you to determine whether or not your idea completely sucks. In most cases, your start-up will fail miserably. If it wasn’t for my ignorance (which some people call stupidity), I wouldn’t have had the patience to start a company. First off, let’s talk about what a “sucky” startup idea is:

1) An idea that costs too much to implement.
2) An idea that requires too many people to implement.
3) An idea that takes too long to make immediately usable to others.

My biggest concern was #3 — how can we make internshipIN a minimalistic product that actually solves a problem? When we first brainstormed the idea, we had to decide what features we’d focus on. Arielle, our third co-founder, had amazing ideas for what internshipIN may eventually be. However, it was important that we not diverge from the original goal of helping students find internships, and helping employers find smart talent. To do this, we decided to make a super basic product that would do as little possible to solve the problem. As Paul Graham would say,

Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful.

Unfortunately, I suck at following my own advice, and had to add in some extra features before coming to my senses.

The idea of over-engineering scares me… it shouldn’t take more than a few nights to create a web-based project that solves a true problem. If people don’t find it useful, it might be smart to find a new idea and move onto a new project.

Lesson: By launching early (and often), the entrepreneur is more likely to determine whether or not the project is worth working on. Worst case scenario, your idea completely sucks. And if it does, you won’t be hitting yourself for wasting so much time on the company that no longer exists.