Shipping in public: what we learned in the first 90 days
Lessons from building skills123 out in the open — the feedback loops, the embarrassing bugs, and the moments that kept us going.
We launched earlier than we wanted to. The product had visible rough edges. The onboarding flow had a step that confused roughly a third of new signups. The mobile layout broke on two Android screen sizes we hadn't tested. It was the best decision we made.
The most valuable thing about launching early isn't the revenue — it's the signal density. In week one, users discovered three bugs that our internal QA would have taken months to encounter naturally, because they approached the product with real intent and real frustration, not test scripts. Humiliating and invaluable in equal measure.
Shipping in public created an obligation that shipping in stealth doesn't. When you tell people something is broken and that you'll fix it, you develop a public track record of your word. Keeping that record clean is a powerful forcing function. We closed 11 of 14 reported bugs within 72 hours, not because we're that fast, but because we really didn't want to be the team that says 'working on it' for two weeks.
"Transparency compounds. Every time we shared a real number, the next conversation started ten steps ahead and saved us a week of trust-building."
— Praveen L.
The feedback that surprised us most wasn't about bugs — it was about what people used the product for. We built skills123 expecting it to be used for work certifications. Our early vocal users were hobbyists: people learning to code, or teach themselves data analysis, or understand AI to demystify the thing transforming their industry. We updated our entire content strategy based on that signal.
Key Insight
The feedback that surprised us most wasn't about bugs — it was about what people used the product for. We built skills123 expecting it to be used for work certifications. Our early vocal users were hobbyists: people learning to code, or teach themselves data analysis, or understand AI to demystify the thing transforming their industry. We updated our entire content strategy based on that signal.
Transparency compounds. Every time we shared a real number — active users, lesson completions, NPS — the next conversation started ten steps ahead. Investors, potential partners, new users who found us through a tweet: they all came in warmer because they already trusted our instinct to be straight. That trust is free to create once you decide to optimize for it.
The moments that kept us going were small and specific. One user emailed to say they'd finally passed a certification exam on the third attempt after going through two skills123 modules. A developer in Nigeria told us that avatar-led instruction was the first time online learning had felt like talking to a real person. Neither email was a business metric. Both were.
If you're considering shipping something before it's ready: the rough edges matter less than you think. The gap between 'ready to show' and 'ready to ship' is almost always smaller than the gap between 'never shipped' and 'learning from users'. Ship small, fix fast, say what's broken before someone else does.
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