Scoping version one, and building it

Somebody has paid, or enough people have shown they would. Now the risk changes shape. It stops being whether anyone wants it and becomes whether you ever finish.

Version one should embarrass you slightly

The most reliable way to never ship is to keep adding. Every addition feels like it improves the product and each one pushes the date out, and the date is what determines whether you find out anything at all.

A useful rule: version one contains only what is needed to produce the outcome you promised. Not what makes it comprehensive, not what makes it defensible, not what makes it feel worth the price. Just the path from where the buyer is to what you said would happen.

• Cut anything that is nice to have. You already know which parts those are.
• Cut anything that exists mainly to justify the price. If the price needs justifying by volume, the price or the positioning is wrong.
• Cut the production polish that does not change the outcome. A clean document beats a designed one that arrives two months later.
• Keep anything the buyer would notice missing. That is the test, and it is a shorter list than it feels.

A scope, cut

The rule is easy to nod at and hard to apply to your own plan, so here it is applied to one. The promised outcome: a freelancer has a pricing sheet for their own services, written, that they can send to a client.

The original plan had eight parts: a history of pricing models, a module on positioning, a module on calculating costs, the pricing sheet template, worked examples in three industries, a section on negotiating, a bonus library of email scripts, and a community.

1. 01Costs and the template stay. Without them there is no sheet, so the outcome does not happen.
2. 02One worked example stays, in the industry most of the buyers are in. Three is a library; one is proof the method works.
3. 03The history goes. Interesting, changes nothing, and adds a week.
4. 04Positioning goes to version two. It is a real subject and it is a different outcome.
5. 05Negotiating and the email scripts go. They are what happens after the sheet exists, which is the next product rather than this one.
6. 06The community goes permanently. It is an ongoing obligation sold as a feature, and an empty one damages the product more than its absence.

Eight parts to three, and the outcome is unchanged. Note which cuts hurt: the ones that made it look substantial. That feeling is the thing the rule is defending you against.

Building it

What this means depends entirely on what you are making, so the advice that generalises is thin. Three things hold across all of them.

1. 01Make the thing in the order the buyer will use it. You will discover the gaps in the sequence while building rather than after launch.
2. 02Show it to one buyer before it is finished. Their confusion is cheap now and expensive later, and they will almost always say yes.
3. 03Use the tools you already know. Learning a new one in the middle is a project inside a project, and it is usually procrastination with a receipt.

The second one is worth insisting on. Send the unfinished middle to one of your pre-sale buyers and watch where they stop. What they struggle with is almost never what you expected, and the fix costs an afternoon now against a refund wave later. Ask them to tell you where they got confused rather than whether they liked it; the second question produces politeness.

Finished is a decision

There is no point at which a digital product is objectively complete. You decide. The useful definition: it produces the outcome you promised, for somebody who follows it, without you being there.

Each clause earns its place. The outcome you promised, not a better one you thought of later. Somebody who follows it, not somebody who skims. Without you being there, which is the clause most unfinished products fail, because they only work if the author explains one more thing.

Everything beyond that belongs to a later version, informed by what buyers actually struggled with rather than what you imagined they would.