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But Foursquare being down, and losing a conversion from you, didn't affect your life any more than if you had just not heard of Foursquare in the first place. "Important" software can actually have negative utility if it's programmed wrong: it can take away your money, make you lose your job, give you a lethal dose of radiation, etc. Most software isn't important in that sense.

The applicable advice for startups here is: when you're just starting off, your software can afford to be hella buggy, because (unless you're entirely dependent on viral growth) one lost conversion here and there doesn't do anything more to your product's momentum than any other leak in your funnel. Make a buggy v1.0, sell it to the people who will buy it, and forget about the tiny[1] number of people who check out your 1.0 and write you off because of it. Then, use the money from 1.0 to fix the bugs, and release version 2.

Assuming your product survives, most of its lifetime will be spent beyond version 2—and so most of the customers your product gets (or loses), it will get (or lose) based on how version ≥2 works, not on how buggy 1.0 was.

[1] The people who will write your 1.0 off will be "tiny" in an absolute, not relative sense. You might be losing 50% of customers because your software is crap—but if that 50% is 50% of 100 people per month, then you still aren't doing yourself much damage. Once you have 50000 satisfied users, those 700 or so people who you scared away in the first seven months will be entirely forgotten. Heck, they might even come back again, if their friends are telling them about all the features of 2.0.




You're argument would be OK if there weren't alternatives to Foursquare.

As it is, there are alternatives available, and my friends experimenting with Foursquare are early-adopters that also have accounts on the alternatives. If your assumption would be right: driving 50% of users to those alternatives is an awful thing to do.

As I said, it might have been just my luck (I don't have something against Foursquare, it was just an example from my experience).

My preference is to just build less functionality in version 1.0, such that scaling / availability is just not an issue, but IMHO first impressions and early adopters count a lot.




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