I think it depends on the market your entering and the problem your solving.
I've brought some very, very unpolished products to market, but they were in a completely new category. They got traction because there were few-to-no other options and they were all the same level of "poor" polish. That's the the market tolerated.
Likewise, ChatGPT is arguably not a particularly polished product. Even more so when it came out. It was a slow, somewhat buggy chat experience with no bells or whistles. Overtime, they've iterated and iterated and iterated.
If ChatGPT came in as "just another search engine", they'd have been laughed at from day one. The power and flexibility of LLMs would have been completely lost against the benchmark of mature, decades old search engines.
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In my opinion, the value of the product you built is the ease of use. All of the major source control platforms have basic levels of assignment and notification. Your system must provide significant value on top of that or be a pleasure to work with.
Right but you're basically proving his point with the ChatGPT example. There was no way that was coming out by bootstrapping. They've received tons in funding and pay-for-use was sort of a built-on based on all the hype about what it could do compared to the competition.
I've brought some very, very unpolished products to market, but they were in a completely new category. They got traction because there were few-to-no other options and they were all the same level of "poor" polish. That's the the market tolerated.
Likewise, ChatGPT is arguably not a particularly polished product. Even more so when it came out. It was a slow, somewhat buggy chat experience with no bells or whistles. Overtime, they've iterated and iterated and iterated.
If ChatGPT came in as "just another search engine", they'd have been laughed at from day one. The power and flexibility of LLMs would have been completely lost against the benchmark of mature, decades old search engines.
----
In my opinion, the value of the product you built is the ease of use. All of the major source control platforms have basic levels of assignment and notification. Your system must provide significant value on top of that or be a pleasure to work with.