• Develop in Public, Refine Later

    by Alexander Becker

    Do something, do anything. Everything you ever do is always under construction. Everything is work in progress.

    Why not publish your new website under its working title on a makeshift domain? Not having decided about the final name and title is not an excuse.

    Develop in public, redirect and refine later. It works not only with domain names, website content, or actual product prototypes. To get started, nothing works better than output. Publish, release, deliver, make something real and let the customer, recipient, beneficiary, have at it.

    In fact, that's what the scientific method is all about --

    The scientific method relies on the hypothesis. What's more intuitive than an initial hypothesis? Everything follows the scientific method, after all.

    Determine a goal, make a plan, follow the plan, evaluate, improve the plan, follow, evaluate, ... is there anything which or anyone who doesn't work this way?

    Scientific researchers propose specific hypotheses as explanations of natural phenomena, and design experimental studies that test these predictions for accuracy. These steps are repeated in order to make increasingly dependable predictions of future results. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry serve to bind more specific hypotheses together in a coherent structure. This in turn aids in the formation of new hypotheses, as well as in placing groups of specific hypotheses into a broader context of understanding.

    Setting up a hypothesis, testing it and replacing it with a better one. If real progress is involved, is there any one thing which works differently in the first place?

    What about starting from scratch? Without a hypothesis?

    Sometimes -- and only sometimes -- you have to start all new, start all over from scratch and tear everything which already is, down.

    Where exactly does the act of creation take place... Is it the letting go? Is it the pristine ground?

    It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything.

    Let's pretend to lose everything and examine the difference it makes -- compared to adhering to structures, conventions, and rules of existing systems.

    That, in part, is the beauty of remixing: You start from scratch without holding on to any weights from previous structures yet you make use of the best parts of what's already manifested.

    Thus, the act of remixing in public, recombining elements which are already tested and trusted, is a virtually guaranteed way to successfully create something more than the sum of its parts. Every subsequent remix will be better and better than its ancestors, hypothesis is being built on top of hypothesis.

    The key is initial output.

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