You've heard all the startup tropes: Launch fast, iterate faster. Move quickly and break things. Fail fast, fail often.
In the rush to get things done, it's easy to forget about quality. After all, who has time to sweat the small stuff when there's a product to ship?
But here's the thing: Quality matters. And finding the right balance between speed and quality is nearly paradoxical. Build too fast and you'll end up with buggy code and unhappy customers. Focus too much on quality, and you'll never ship anything at all.
Sometimes it's about the details
I recently switched from using ConvertKit's to Resend for emails on my site. Resend is a more developer-friendly service which gives me all the bells and whistles I could ever dream of for integration. Once I got everything working, I spent some time developing a simple, branded template for transactional emails. It's essentially the frame that goes around the confirmation email people get when they sign up for Tiny Improvements.
Right now, the template is used exclusively for that one email - but I wanted to make sure it looked and felt right. I spent some time looking for inspiration, set up a quick Figma prototype, and then got to work building it using React Email.
The Bigger Picture
It's a small detail that probably matters most to me, but once it was done, it felt like my integration with Resend was complete.
The thing is, nobody will ever notice that I spent time on this. It's likely that this email will get banished to my readers' email archives within seconds of being opened, but that's kind of the point. If I did it right, this message should be consistent with everything someone experiences when they come across my work. Ideally, it goes almost entirely unnoticed, because it feels like it's connected to everything else I do.
The quick way out here would be to use a fairly basic, blank template, or to fall back completely to An old-timey text email. I feel fairly confident in saying that either of those would feel out of place. Part of my whole schtick is that devs should care about design; failing to put in the effort here would be a pretty big contradiction.
If you're doing things right, nobody will notice
...and sometimes that's just the way it is. This is a quip from a great little scene in Futurama -- and I think it's a great centering thought for design work in general. As unsatisfying as it sounds, this is a sign of a successful design.
Using a light touch is a delicate but attainable balance. You don't need to be Dieter Rams to meet that standard. You just need to be consistent. For a lot of us, that's a great place to start.
How you do one thing is how you do everything
I've just finished re-listening to Unreasonable Hospitality, a book that I've written about in the past. It's written by Will Guidara, co-owner and operator of one of the top restaurants in the world, Eleven Madison Park.
There's a great chapter in the book discussing the great lengths they went to in order to create a world-class dining experience. At the restaurant, they spend time making sure that plates are laid on the table so that the makers' mark on their underside are facing guests perfectly.
What a wild thing to do - most guests will never flip their plate over to see who made it. For those that do take a look, will it even occur to them that the plate was placed that way intentionally?
Probably not. But that's not the point.
The point is that the staff at Eleven Madison Park know that the plates are placed that way. They know that they're doing everything they can to make the experience perfect.
Still, there is no bar
Remember, there is no bar for publishing online. You can publish whatever you want, however you want, and nobody can stop you.
I've talked to loads of people who never get started sharing their work online because it's "not ready" -- and I get it. It's a scary thing to put yourself out there.
To be perfectly honest, if you're not ready to share your work yet, this advice is probably not for you (yet). Fundamentally, it's most valuable to build, ship, collect feedback, and iterate -- and if you're not shipping, you're not iterating.
Once you do start putting your product or your writing or your podcast or your sculpture out there, though, you're setting a bar for yourself, and there's always room to improve.
Start small
If it feels overwhelming, start small. Pick one thing that you can do today to make your [thing] better. Go update that misaligned header, or fix a broken link, or finish that prototype that's been waiting for you.
It doesn't have to be perfect -- just better than it was yesterday.
Some more of my work this week
📼 Part 3 of my product analytics is live
If you've been following along on YouTube, you may have seen the first couple videos I shared about debugging a conversion problem on my site. In the first 2 videos, I found and fixed a technical problem that was causing signups to fail. Now I've moved on to a more strategic problem: How do I get more people to sign up in the first place? See how I'm tackling that challenge using A/B testing in the latest video.
🎙️ Avoid an API billing nightmare
Supergood solves a problem we all fear: by monitoring your API usage, they help detect and prevent massive bills from SaaS Providers. If you have recurring nightmares about your AWS bill spinning out of control, you'll love my podcast interview with founder Alex Klarfeld - No more API usage nightmares.
Raise the bar for yourself
- Really Good Emails is exactly what it sounds like: a curated repository of well-designed emails. Such a helpful tool.
- Did you know that fonts have versions? Inter, everyone's favorite typeface, recently launched version 4.0, which you can poke around with on the incredibly beautiful showcase website for the font.
