On August 19, 2009, at 12:30 pm, Tom Lehman wrote the first line of the code of the Rap Genius project he conceived about interpreting rap texts. And at 18:22 of the same day, the first version of the website was ready. It took less than six hours to create a service where 40 million new users visit every month, which has already attracted $ 17 million in venture capital investments, and around which an online scandal has recently broken out, resolving the project and making it even more popular.

On the very first day, having laid out the Killa Cam song by rapper Cam'ron, Lehman introduced the functions that are still in demand. Of course, we were simply obliged to call him to speak at the last Design + Startup conference, held under the patronage of the First Round Foundation. At this meeting, Lehman shared the four words that made Rap Genius able to happen.

“The first version of Rap Genius was just disgusting. But thanks to this disgusting, I learned the secret of how to do things on the Internet. The secret is simple: the worse, the better. ”

What does this mean in practice? Tom Lehmann gladly tells us about it.
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“The worse the better” shifts mountains

“For example, you did something, and people tell you that it’s awful, anyone can do better. That’s how it was with Wikipedia, ”Lehman said. As a vivid example, he cites an article about asphalt . Now it is a detailed publication with many technical and historical details. But if someone at one time decided in the first version to write the entire article at once in one sitting, then such an article would never have seen the light. What happened instead was worse, but better. Someone moved mountains, having written only one line : “Asphalt is a material that is used to cover roads.” And the rest then continued from this place. “The same thing happened with Rap Genius, and therein lies a great power,” Lehman says.

At the time of launch of Rap Genius, its implementation and functionality were objectively bad. There were no tools for adding and editing annotations, and Lehman had to add them manually right in the code. But the basic idea was already clear: you could click on the text of the song, and there was a hint what this text means.

“Think about it: why everyone now comes to Rap Genius, was created by me many years ago,” notes Lehman, “while I was not a good programmer, and certainly did not think about any design, skills in which I at that time it was not at all. ”

Today you can not afford to do the perfect thing. If you do this, you will never do anything at all. Every time you will be stopped by the fear of being ridiculed. But in one you must be strictly self-critical: in the matter of priorities.

“The worse the better” saves time

That is why Lehman does not share the idea of ​​prototyping. “My approach is that I allow myself to do things badly, and then watch how people in reality interact with this, which is still quite immature and functionally undeveloped. Once you understand exactly what you want to do, you must do it immediately. ”

We have never been so stupid and mediocre, as now. And it really should inspire us. Therefore, today we cannot afford to create ideal things: after all, we may not even know what all this should be like.

At the very beginning, Lehman planned a tool that would allow anonymous voting for other users' annotations. "I thought we definitely need to fasten this, and it was utter idiocy: it was full of things that needed to be done to improve Rap Genius, but this feature was not exactly in their circle."

Or another example. It suddenly occurred to him that two users can edit the same annotation to the song at the same time. Therefore, the site simply needs a conflict resolution system. “Without such a system, two people who make changes at the same time can easily wipe over each other’s texts, and this will be a fig. And I posted a notice that I will correct this situation in the very near future. Four years have passed, and this notice is still hanging, and don't give a shit. I thought it would be a big problem, but it didn’t become a problem at all. So if you can’t know what will be your biggest problem, how can you know what features and tools you should have? ”

That is why you should not immediately threaten to do something beautiful and perfect. Postpone this rush until you wise up. Just do what you need to do. When you are a young startup, you cannot afford to waste time on disposable features.

“The biggest mortal sin of a developer and engineer is not working at all on what is needed. I can swear that 90% of you are now doing something completely different. You are sure to work hard, but you might as well not work at all. You must be ruthless in making the right decisions. "

“The worse the better” is the basis of big decisions.

“Many people are scared of big global things,” says Lehman. “You create a site that you like more or less, and then you start to attach small features to it. If you are a perfectionist, then you will only be engaged in creating ideal things, and you will spend a lot of time on something that does not matter. And I came to tell you: do not exchange small things, work on the most important. And the most important is the users. ”

Lehman knows this from his own experience. Two years ago, Rap Genius announced that they would interpret not only rap, but also rock, poetry and news. Those. move from one niche to four wider. “This was the underlying feature we discussed before death. We shouted at each other, leaving the Y Combinator, sitting in the car, at dinner, constantly arguing and discussing - for two years in a row. ” You can still see on the site the consequences of the jolt we made. Poet Ezra Pound is named producer of the poem of Thomas Eliot's Barren Earth. The novel “The Great Gatsby” by the American writer Fitzgerald is presented as a musical album. And Abraham Lincoln's famous Gettysburg speech in the USA is dismantled and interpreted as poetry. “The worse, the better” means that you will do things that seem out of order. But this does not make Lehmann and his co-founders shudder at night.

“We were able to get that important piece, for the sake of which it is worth trying. And it didn't matter anymore that we would have to go back and correct a bunch of mistakes. We rolled it out, and people began to use it: that's what matters most. You can always step back, create a huge list of what needs to be fixed and fixed. But this is not at all what we should do at the very beginning. ”

If you focus on minor features, you can deal with them forever and never make a big impact on the product. It is very important to always carry out a test: will the project be able to enter an IPO without this feature? If you can, then you should not do it.

Of course, all this goes against the usual logic of developers. “Most people will say: well, we created this big, important thing, and now let's go back and make it better,” Lehman says. “But in fact, nobody cares. People will be satisfied with what they have. The only thing you have to think about is: what will be the next big thing? What makes people go crazy? Let's do it and do it! ”

“The worse, the better” like a mantra

For some people, Lehman’s mantra sounds familiar. “Made an iteration - made a release”: everyone knows this concept. However, people still do not understand the essence, says Lehman. No matter how often they hear or talk about it, they are still wasting their time, worrying about nothing, postponing the main thing for later, and the list goes on. The steepness of "the worse the better" is that this phrase easily and permanently stuck in the brain.

“People say to me: what are you, do you always want to get the worst result? And I answer them that I am not talking about the result, but about the process. ” And then Lehman quotes Reed Hoffman , the founder of LinkedIn:

"If you launched the first version of the product, and nothing annoys you about it, you launched it too late."

“Even if people understand the original concept, they don’t follow it in practice,” notes Lehman. “They need to be reminded regularly about it, constantly kicking them. That is why it’s good to have "the worse, the better" - these are just four words. " And they even released a T-shirt with these words.

The problem is not only in the forgetfulness of people. Following the philosophy “the worse the better” can put you in a conflict situation with public opinion. When you release a non-ideal product, you need to be prepared that some will hate you.

“It may start to seem like everyone is angry at you all the time. You can take a look at the Rap Genius forum, you will see all these comments: your service is primitive, your search is complete rubbish, even my dog ​​could have made the forum much better. Of course, all this makes me nervous and worried. But you need to be able to constantly deal with people screaming at you and with yourself, screaming at yourself. This is a philosophy of strict adherence to principles, resistance to depression and self-control. ”

This has happened to Lehman more than once. How many times he looked through the forum and thought to himself: after all, all these people are right, all this is really disgusting. But Lehman has advice for any founder, developer, or designer who finds himself in such a critical situation: “You do everything right. If you were wasting time creating the perfect, you would never even begin. You would spend time on unnecessary things. You would always just do what you worked on the little things. "

Not giving up is very difficult. But in the long run, this is what matters.