Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Shipping beats polish
Before, getting every UI interaction and every little thing right mattered more than shipping early, since time made little difference to the outcome, and a product with rough corners might as well not ship. Now the urgency of introducing the product matters more.
Work mode for everyone
ChatGPT's work mode shows the tradeoff. It brings agents to a billion chat users who may never have used one, and the challenge is making that natural and easy, with no explicit decision required and none of the technical machinery behind agents to think about. Plenty remains to make it simpler, especially for people using it for everyday tasks rather than productivity.
Feedback and speed
Feedback before launch is best, and iterating as fast as possible while listening to the right signals matters whether it comes before or after.
Why ship a product before it is polished?
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is known for the line that if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you launched too late. The reasoning is that real users reveal which flaws matter, and many polished details turn out to be ones nobody wanted. Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn in 2002, and it launched in May 2003.
Why did Gmail stay in beta so long?
Gmail opened on April 1, 2004, by invitation only, with one gigabyte of storage when rivals offered a few megabytes. Google kept the beta label on it for more than five years. During that time people used it daily while Google kept adding features. Google dropped the beta label in July 2009.
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