Basecamp / 37signals

Answers How do I decide which features to cut from v1? How do I decide what to build next? How often should an early-stage startup ship? How do I build a roadmap without over-planning? How do product teams keep a consistent shipping rhythm as they grow? When is my product 'ready' to launch? How often should I be launching, is once a quarter too much? How do I know when to stop researching an idea and just start building? I keep polishing the design and refactoring instead of shipping. How do I know I'm gold-plating my MVP versus doing necessary work? How much should I spend building an MVP as a bootstrapped founder in India, and where does the money actually leak? I built my MVP on no-code but my technical co-founder wants to rewrite it in real code. When is that migration actually worth it? How do I write a spec for a developer when I'm not technical? What's a fair way to structure a milestone-based contract with a dev agency? How much should an MVP realistically cost to build in India? How do I keep an offshore or remote dev team accountable across time zones? What are the warning signs a developer is building the wrong thing? When my technical hire and I disagree on the tech stack, whose call is it? How do I run a weekly ship cadence when I am non-technical and depend on a dev agency or freelancers? Every user interview gives me a different feature request. How do I turn messy feedback into a real prioritisation decision? What is a sane way to prioritise between fixing bugs, paying customer promises, and building the exciting new thing? How do I stop myself from adding features nobody asked for just because I enjoy building? Should I share a public roadmap with my early users, or does that just create pressure and expectations I cannot meet? How do I keep shipping weekly when I am building solo and constantly interrupted by support, sales, and admin? What does a 'soft launch' actually look like, and is it just a cop-out for being scared to ship? I keep tweaking the landing page instead of launching. How do I tell polishing from procrastinating? My first launch went okay but the second felt embarrassing, like 'why are they back again already?' Is relaunch fatigue real? My co-founder wants a big coordinated launch, I want to just ship quietly and iterate. Who's right?

Answers How long should building an MVP take?

Answers Should I hire an agency or a freelancer to build my MVP? How do I know if my product is confusing to users? Why does good design actually matter for an early-stage startup? When is my product 'ready' to launch? My launch flopped and nobody cared, did I mess it up? I keep polishing the design and refactoring instead of shipping. How do I know I'm gold-plating my MVP versus doing necessary work? Should my MVP be a mobile app or a web app? My users are mostly on phones in smaller Indian cities. How much should I spend building an MVP as a bootstrapped founder in India, and where does the money actually leak? I'm a domain expert with no coding background. Should I spend a month learning a no-code tool myself or hire a no-code freelancer? How much should an MVP realistically cost to build in India? Is it a mistake to hire one developer to build my whole product alone? How do I run a weekly ship cadence when I am non-technical and depend on a dev agency or freelancers? Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of? How do I stop myself from adding features nobody asked for just because I enjoy building? What does a 'soft launch' actually look like, and is it just a cop-out for being scared to ship? I keep tweaking the landing page instead of launching. How do I tell polishing from procrastinating? My first launch went okay but the second felt embarrassing, like 'why are they back again already?' Is relaunch fatigue real? Should I gate my launch behind a waitlist, or does a waitlist just kill the momentum I worked to build? How do I write the actual launch post so it doesn't read like a press release nobody asked for? My co-founder wants a big coordinated launch, I want to just ship quietly and iterate. Who's right?

Answers Should my MVP be a mobile app or a web app? My users are mostly on phones in smaller Indian cities.

Answers How do I build a roadmap without over-planning? Should we ship an ugly, half-working version now or wait until it feels good enough to be proud of?