8bithero

For what now feels like an eternity, I've been working on my personal project. I've spent an insane amount of time and effort on it. I've built a number of features and I finally have a design I'm happy with. I think it's fair to say "I have a working MVP"... But I seem to have this fear of reaching out to people.

Despite having a basic set of features that make it usable, there are still a ton more that I feel would make it "more complete". So I convince myself "I'll just add this extra feature/design tweak and then I'll try reaching out" and I never do because I always find the next thing that "needs to be done".

My app is in the menswear space - I built it as a tool to help me experiment with matching clothes and finding new combinations for clothes I already owned. I know a good avenue would be to reach out to fashion bloggers and see what they think of it. However, knowing there are still a lot of features I want to add, I keep talking myself out of it. I have a fear that if I reach out and they don't like it I may burn that bridge.

I have reached out to a few people who came back with positive feedback along the lines "It looks really good and could be useful" but I know in order for it to be truly useful there needs to be a bit of a community to share creations. So not quite sure how to follow up from there. I'm worried if I ask them to create content and there aren't other users to interact, they might try it once and then abandon it.

I guess this post is a shot in the dark to try figure out if fears of "burnt bridges" are legitimate concerns and if anyone else has had this fear of launching and how they managed to overcome it. Regarding building a community, I could create fake content and "fake it till I make it", but that feels slightly disingenuous and I'm worried this will be another "just one more feature" trap.

I've struggled with this for a while, so really hoping someone might have some good advice they'd be willing to share:)