Fuckups in IT podcast: You can’t sell anything on localhost.

Fuckups in IT is a technological podcast that pulls you into the world of IT. Aside from valuable advice and recommendations, you will find out about various, often rather entertaining situations we face daily in our IT universe.

Sometime at the end of the last year I was a guest of the podcast host Matej Kotrba. Together we had a chat about a topic any entrepreneur or freelancer may encounter in their line of work. We, as a company that offers our customers programming of custom-made information systems and mobile applications, in technologies such as Java, PHP or C#, have had the opportunity to learn the sort of problems keeping the product on localhost can cause.

We discussed this issue with Matej and talked about the reasons why we try to convince the customers to release the product sooner rather than later, even if it is not perfect yet.

First and foremost, it is necessary to take into account the risk of entering the market because if you keep striving for a perfect product and working on its development, then you may miss the boat and end up losing to your competition whose product may be far less than superior to yours. Also, if the product is still being further developed or tweaked while already in use by the customers, we can deal with any possible issues far more effectively.

So, when is that right time?

Well, there is probably no definitive answer to this question because we know that a product is never perfect. It will always require updates. It is essential, however, that it does not contain any major errors which may cost both, us and the customer, the brand. In our experience we can say that a product may be released when we are happy with it.

And what are our recommendations?

•  software development should now be cloud-based or based on a similar environment on which it will be deployed because the mere transfer from localhost to cloud may cause a significant number of problems;
• we refrain from promoting the product right after it has been deployed. We test it with a small number of customers first and in case there is no major issue to be found, the customer may launch their marketing campaign;
• and the rest of our advice? Listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, Google podcast to find out other useful tips and tricks…