My Million-User Mistake
Mark Zuckerberg had an internal motto at Facebook. "Done is better than perfect.”
I should have listened to him.
Our early engineering team was small. It was mostly me, a data scientist, and a graduate full-stack engineer. We were good at building and shipping, but we knew we were horrible at UI/UX. It was a blind spot, and I was determined to fix it.
I decided we needed professional help, so I went to Upwork to find it. We hired a design agency that did great work making things look pretty. But pretty and functional are two different things. Their redesign of our existing Chrome extension, Hashtag Analytics, took two months and actually made the user experience worse. There were two warnings I failed to see: the slow pace, and the bad UX.
Then, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released.
It was not just a product launch. It was a tidal wave that took the world by storm. Every news outlet, every social media feed, was talking about it. A gold rush began as builders and founders scrambled to create new AI products.
The Chrome Web Store was an open frontier. There were barely any extensions with "AI" or "ChatGPT" in the title. An opportunity this big only comes along once in a while. I was watching one extension, a simple tool that summarized Google searches, and its growth was explosive. It was gaining tens of thousands of installations a day with zero marketing budget. The sheer amount of chatter on social media gave it endless mentions and backlinks.
It was during this time, watching that rocket ship take off, that the idea hit me. AI commenting.
I called my engineer, Li Voon. We spent half an hour on the phone debating it. Could it work? Why would people use it? We decided to give it a try. The race was on.
My first decision was a mistake. I went back to the same design agency.
The brief was simple: an AI that reads a post and generates a relevant comment. But the process was slow. Two weeks of back and forth to get the design right. Every day felt like a lifetime as the AI gold rush exploded around us. I finally lost my patience and told them to hurry.
The final design was complicated. Users had to copy a post link, paste it into our extension, generate a comment, then copy that comment back into the comment box.
Li Voon took the design and built the entire thing in a single weekend. Our copywriter, Sally, wrote the landing page. We submitted it to the Chrome Web Store.
It took five days for Google to approve it. Our extension went live on December 22, 2022.
We were too late.
By then, the Chrome Store was flooded. The open frontier was gone. That AI search extension I had been watching had become a rocket ship. It hit one million users in two months, then 2.5 million in five, all without a marketing budget. That was the rocket ship we were supposed to be on. Instead, when we launched, we were no longer on the front page for searches like "AI" or "ChatGPT". We were buried at the bottom of the list, invisible.
We hustled. We sent emails, made social posts, and used the same growth hack from our Hashtag Analytics tool that got us our first 2,000 users. It worked, but it was a grind. We were fighting for every user when we could have been riding a massive wave.
I often think about that two week delay.
If we had just built a simple, imperfect version ourselves in the first week of December, we could have been one of the first. We might have a million users today. Instead, I chased perfection and we lost our perfect timing.
That was my biggest mistake building Engage AI. I chose perfect when the market demanded done.
My Key Takeaways from This Mistake:
In a new market, speed is your single biggest advantage.
An imperfect, shipped product is infinitely better than a perfect one on the drawing board.
Listen for the market's signals, not just your own desire for perfection.
Have you ever faced a similar dilemma? A time when chasing perfection cost you an opportunity? I would love to hear your story in the comments.