Half-Assed Whole vs. Kick-Ass Half

You can turn a bunch of great ideas into a crappy product real fast by trying to do them all at once. You just can’t do everything you want to do and do it well.

Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Half-assed products abound. Sometimes it’s simply a lack of quality. Often it’s something else.

When we think of a product, we usually think of it’s features. How many features? What features? Et cetera. If you haven’t built a product before, let’s do a quick thought experiment.

I tell you that you have two hours to clean the house. You have toddlers. That are home. And awake.

How much got done in that two hours?

Now I tell you that you have two hours to clean the kitchen. Same toddlers. Still awake.

How well did the kitchen get cleaned in each scenario? I bet the kitchen was a lot more clean in the second scenario.

Cut your ambition in half. You’re better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.

When we pare down our tasks, we do better at accomplishing them.

Same goes with product design. When I started building my chord finder app last year, the feature list was long. The competition had tuners, metronomes, and even song sheets. But those features never once hit my list. Because I couldn’t create a kick-ass chord finder if I was building a tuner. I’d end up with a half-assed chord finder. And a half-assed tuner.

But I did have other features on the list that didn’t ship with version 1.0. They didn’t ship with 1.1 either.

Most of your great ideas won’t seem all that great once you get some perspective, anyway. And if they truly are that fantastic, you can always do them later.

As you build, you will often get to a point that the product is complete. And sometimes it will surprise you. A feature you thought essential wasn’t. A feature you thought wasn’t essential was. If you prioritized your tasks well, you didn’t build the inessential features.

But the beauty is, you can always add them later.

Selah Chords will never have a tuner. That is a different product. Selah Chords is about chords. But coming to Selah Chords early this year is custom tunings, filtering, and more.

I build kick-ass half— not half-assed whole— products. Download Selah Chords today and see what a great, easy-to-use, hand-crafted chord finder can be.

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