This is part 2 of my series on AppReviews.
Part 1 is available here
If I’m being honest, my first instinct with AppReviews was to keep adding more.
There’s always this temptation when you build something yourself. The ideas start flowing.
“Oh, this would be useful.”
“This would make it even better.”
“What if I also added this?”
And before you realize it, you’re no longer building a product. You’re building a backlog.
I wanted AppReviews to be useful, but I also wanted it to exist. And at some point, those two goals start to conflict.
The constant pull of “just one more feature”
Once the core was working, it became very easy to imagine what AppReviews could become.
- A dashboard with charts.
- Advanced filters.
- More analytics.
- More automation.
- More more more.
All of these ideas were valid. Some of them are still on my list. The problem wasn’t the ideas themselves. The problem was that if I kept going down that path, I knew I would never ship.
I’ve been there before. Spending weeks polishing details, adding features, tweaking UX, until the initial excitement slowly fades and the project stalls.
I didn’t want that to happen here.
So I forced myself to ask a very uncomfortable question over and over again:
Is this required for v1, or do I just enjoy building it?
More often than not, the honest answer was the second one.
Shipping v1 meant accepting that it wouldn’t be “complete”
At some point, I had to decide what “good enough” meant.
For AppReviews, v1 had to do a few things really well:
- Reviews should be fetched automatically.
- They should be visible without effort.
- They should reach people where they already are.
- And reacting to them should be fast.
That’s it.
Everything else was optional.
This was harder than it sounds, because as an engineer, it’s very tempting to keep improving things. To add safety nets. To add flexibility. To think ahead for every possible use case.
But I kept coming back to the same thought: if v1 already solves the core problem, delaying the release doesn’t actually help users. It only satisfies my urge to keep building.
So I shipped.
Not because there was nothing left to do, but because there was already enough value there.
What AppReviews would not be (at least for v1)
One of the most useful exercises for me was to explicitly define what AppReviews was not trying to become.
- It wasn’t going to be a full review management platform.
- It wasn’t going to replace support tools.
- It wasn’t going to be a heavy analytics product.
- It wasn’t going to require hours of setup.
There are already great tools that do those things. I wasn’t trying to compete with them.
AppReviews is intentionally narrow in scope. Its job is to reduce friction and shorten the feedback loop between users and product teams.
Anything that didn’t serve that goal directly was pushed back.
Some of those ideas will probably come back later. Others might never make it. And that’s fine.
Shipping early changed how I think about the product
Releasing v1 didn’t feel like “I’m done”. It felt more like opening a door.
Once the product is out there, feedback becomes real. You stop guessing. You stop building in a vacuum. You start hearing what people actually care about.
That’s a much better foundation for deciding what to build next than a long list of assumptions.
Looking back, I’m glad I resisted the urge to keep adding features before launching. AppReviews is far from finished, but it’s already doing the job it was meant to do.
And most importantly, it exists.
Leaving room to grow
I still have a lot of ideas for AppReviews. Probably too many. Some of them will turn into features. Some won’t.
But by shipping early, I made sure the product stays grounded in real usage, not just in my head.
v1 was about focus.
The next versions can be about refinement.
In the next post, I’ll dive into the technical side of AppReviews: the stack, the architecture, and the choices I made to keep things simple and maintainable as a solo developer.
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