Apps, like art, gain meaning from their audience. (So ship that beta now.)

I released the first beta of DoTheThing.app earlier this month. It felt incomplete and far too humble to show the world, but I did it anyway. It’s part of my training as a creator, something I learned way back in art school: never show your work for the first time when it’s already finished.

Do The Thing still lacks a lot of what I’d call its defining features. I shipped it without notifications, which will eventually be one of the app’s major selling points. Some features are half-implemented. While I didn’t like shipping it this way, I knew those features were only a small piece of the puzzle.

And some of those puzzle pieces would only fit into place once I got the beta out there.

You’re always too close to your own work for objectivity.

I learned this as a novelist long before I learned it as a developer: once you spend a certain number of hours on a project, you lose perspective.

This isn’t a character flaw. It’s a byproduct of putting in the necessary work. Your brain has gone over the same problems so many times, you know their contours intuitively. You take background knowledge for granted.

When I first gave Do The Thing to my husband — an experienced software engineer very eager to try to break it — he couldn’t find his way around. This despite the fact that I specifically wrote the app to be self-explanatory. It felt like those times I’ve given a first draft to my writing group and they’ve missed the entire point of the story.

I was thankful for this experience. Doubly so for my instinct to sit down and watch someone use my app as soon as I had enough of an app to do so. It helped me prioritize and refine my efforts, which reduced the amount of work I had to scrap later.

Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Neither should code.

The image of a solitary writer plugging away at a novel for months on end, then selling it to a Big Five publisher at auction is (mostly) a myth. My art school professors reminded us constantly that “art doesn’t happen in a vacuum.”

In other words, it’s a feedback loop. How others interpret your work is part of the work. If no one gets the message you’re trying to send, that’s your problem, not theirs.

Read the acknowledgements section of your favorite novel. You’ll probably see a list of beta readers and critique partners whom the author credits with the book’s success.

This isn’t politeness. It’s the truth. If you’re creating something intended to resonate with people other than you, your opinion isn’t the only one that matters. Your vision matters. It’s the lens through which you’ll receive all that external feedback. But your eventual implementation of that vision may look very different than you thought it would when you started.

I wanted to get that first version out there while the stakes were still low.

My first batch of beta invites went to a group of 25 people. I’ve gotten some great feedback from a handful of them and sent out more invites. Soon I’ll open up a much larger closed beta.

At the time of that first release, I had pretty thorough test coverage. I’d also been using Do The Thing on my own device every day for a couple months. All the same, I knew better than to think I was shipping a bug-free app. This first foray would show me what I’d overlooked.

Again, my life as a writer taught me an important lesson: don’t make a grab at the top prize too soon. Once you start submitting your work to The New Yorker or your dream agent or the App Store, the stakes are high. A mistake can burn a bridge forever — at least for this project.

When I released the first version of Do The Thing, I did it like a writer: I started with one person whose feedback I could trust. After I worked through that, I gave the app to a small handful of folks who had offered to help test it. I didn’t send beta invites to anyone who seemed like they might expect a polished product. Their turn will come very soon, but the app isn’t ready for them yet.

It takes a certain kind of reader to look at your ugly first draft and see its potential. If that’s what you’re offering — an ugly first draft — you need to find that person. And just like your query letter might not land on the first attempt, the first release of your app might not either. Better to let those form rejections and bug reports roll in from a limited number of low-stakes sources. If your first round of user feedback comes in the form of one-star App Store reviews, you’re getting it too late.

Great work requires vulnerability.

While I learned to code using some wonderful tutorials and a lot of late-night programming discussions with my husband, I didn’t learn to make a good app that way. I learned to make a good app in art school.

To make a good app, I needed more than basic technical knowledge and a lot of unit tests. I needed the confidence to be vulnerable and show my initial attempts to others. Even if my efforts felt embarrassingly basic, I needed to talk about what I was doing and hear how I could do better. I needed user feedback.

My studio critiques in art school and my writing group meetings now have desensitized me to showing those ugly first drafts. I’m well-accustomed to showing work in progress and hearing others speak very competently and articulately about its flaws. To succeed in that world is to grow a thick skin and process the experience with a growth mindset. Rather than feeling foolish or demoralized, I finish critiques of my work feeling inspired. The next steps start clarifying in my mind right away, like a photo print in the developer bath.

That vulnerability and willingness to share early versions of the app — albeit with a select group of people with managed expectations — will make Do The Thing so much better when it finally appears on the App Store. While the code is mine, the process will belong to many others. All of us will be better for it.