“Make it simple, but significant.”

The business world has long talked about “Minimum Viable Product”. It’s that final stage of building 1.0 of your product; the point at which you can release it to the wild and be reasonably sure that it’s not going to fall flat on its face. It’s a common philosophy among tech companies, but it’s a blatant betrayal of your customers’ trust in your product.

Your customers – and stop calling them “users”, for chrissakes – are you giving you their time, money, information, and more in exchange for what they are reasonably expecting to be a reliable product with a solid feature set. Instead, many companies are using their 1.0’s as a Kickstarter because they were too lazy to get something worthwhile out the door and rushed their product to market.

You can see this mindset with too many products these days; Facebook’s Slingshot, Google’s Wave/Buzz/Google+/Android One, Apple with a laundry list of software the last two years, and many, many more. Treating your earliest adopters as guinea pigs by throwing half-assed software into the world is a slap in the face to those most willing to be evangelists for your product.

Your customers know that not every feature will be ready on day one, but having major bugs in core features is a sign of disregard for those whose lives you’re trying to improve. So pump the brakes, do some more QA, and focus on getting a Minimum Acceptable Product out the door – one that you and your customers are both happy to say they used the 1.0 of.