The Art of Being Bad but Good Enough
Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou
Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.
Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.
His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.
[Original Viddler/Flash video — embed retired (2010–2014 era). Framework explanation preserved below.]
The first launch is usually crappy
Whenever we first launch a product or make a business plan, we would be so proud of it and send it to everyone. A month later, we think it’s so crappy that we are embarrassed to send it to anyone. Then we make a super improvement and think it’s the best thing in the world again. After a month of sending it to everyone, we realize it’s so hideous that we don’t want to send it to anyone again. We did that for half a dozen times.
Sometimes we tell ourselves, “If it’s good enough to be sent to everyone during the first revision, it should be good enough when it’s version 4. We don’t need to wait 2 weeks for version 5 to come out.”
Improve your product with your users/customers
If it takes a year to create a good product, taking a year and improving it at home will not be anywhere close to launching it early and using the rest of the time to improve from customer feedback. As long as you are responding to them and improving fast, they will be patient with you.
Even if you disappointed the first 100 people who used the site, you make sure that the Millions of others use a good product later on. Plus, the first 100 will hear it if you do a good job a year later and come back to it.
Take rare criticism seriously
Most of the time, you will hear people saying how good your stuff is. However, pay extra attention when someone says you need to improve, especially when it’s someone with more experience.
People don’t like to tell you negative things, so when you happen to hear one, it might be a rare opportunity for you to realize what are the biggest things you need to work on.