Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, famously said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” I’m not sure he’s right, but I’m also not sure he’s wrong. Whether your product is ready to ship can be broken down into some more focused questions:

• Does it do enough?
• Is it reliable enough?
• Does it need more polish?
I see people err too often in all of these. Number of features is one that trips people up because a product’s creator is likely to be full of ideas of all of the things the product can be extended to do in the future. They can be so excited that by comparison a single, simple, useful thing is underwhelming.

Reliability (or correctness) is another area where creators can be led astray. The quality bar needs to be high enough that the product:

• almost always succeeds at its core function with a relatively narrow range of inputs/li>
• doesn’t do anything catastrophic like delete files/li>
• doesn’t make your customers think you’re idiots

But it does not need to succeed at secondary functions or a wide range of inputs. It does not need to be bug free as long as it avoids causing harm. It does need to be good enough that your customer has some minimum level of confidence in your competence.

Polish is probably the most dangerous because something that looks ugly or crude is going to be most embarrassing. The other part of the danger is that it’s the one that matters least. When you’re building a new product, no amount of polish is going to cover up its uselessness or failures.

There’s definitely a bias toward waiting too long. While I’m not convinced I’d set the bar where Reid Hoffman did, my far is not much higher. Ship when your product does one useful thing with a low chance of collateral damage to the customer and without destroying their perception of your confidence. If using your product is an iota better overall than not using it, ship it, even if it’s far short of what it could be. Compare your product against what exists now, not what could exist. Otherwise you may not get a chance to build it into what it could be.