When you are in a startup, you always a sense of frustration that you haven’t been able to deliver all of your wonderful vision. Of course, it could happen in a big company as well, if you are really passionate about your job, but in a startup it happens all the time because entrepreneurs are wildly, dangerously passionate about what they do!

All the compromises that you had to make because of time and money constraints, the features you were forced to postpone, and this nagging sense of embarrassment that your 1.0 wasn’t all it could have been: “If only I had had more time and money, I could have built all these other cool features for our first release” you say to yourself.

If you ever feel a little depressed about the state of your version 1.0, there are two ways to boost your self-esteem and feel re-energized:

• Remember the experienced entrepreneur’s mantra: “if you aren’t embarrassed by your first version, you have waited too long to ship“. We are not sure who coined this phrase – it’s been attributed to a number of people over the years – and there’s a great post called “1.0 is the loneliest number” that makes the case for shipping early, warts and all, and then iterating fast in response to customer feedback.
• The other way to quickly start feeling better about your product is to visit the AT&T website to do something relative straightforward, like adding money to a pre-paid phone. The user experience that AT&T provides is guaranteed to make you feel better about your own product.