I've always tried to be quite iterative when it comes to shipping as I feel like that's the fastest way to build something people actually want. You build something small. People use it. You get feedback. You improve and expand. You get more feedback. Etc.

With WIP I've taken this to an extreme shipping very small updates at a time. The reason for this I think is three-fold:

1. The todo system and streak empower me to ship daily and thus ship small things at a time. This makes me think about what the minimum functionality would look like for a certain feature.

2. Getting feedback from my customers (the WIP community) is really easy because we're all in the chat. I'm constantly talking to you all, getting instant feedback, and actually seeing how you use the product in real life. I don't need to rely on abstract data or one-at-a-time customer interviews. It's just all there in the chat.

3. Since you are all makers too, you tend to be understanding when something breaks, doesn't fully work, or isn't as polished yet. This means I can launch something quicker than I'd usually do. And some times that means finding out quicker that I'm going the wrong direction and so I can iterate quicker.

So my lessons learned are as follows:

1. Use WIP to motivate yourself to ship daily :D

2. Make sure you have an efficient way to talk to your customers. If it's difficult for your specific product I'd even go as far as reconsidering that's really the type of product you want to build.

3. Make sure your first users are early adopters and open to things breaking once a while. If your product is valuable enough people won't mind if it isn't as polished.