A baby spends 9 months in the womb before it is born. But that’s not the interesting part; pregnancy is only a small fraction of the journey. The real adventure comes after pregnancy: growing the child into a full grown human.

Same goes for products. Your product is not done when everything works as it should, when that button is oh-so finely crafted. That’s just the beginning. The real journey begins when your product is released into the wild, when people start using it.

Last week I went to the Product Hunt hackathon. Definitely the best hackathon of my life. I met some really awesome people, and built a really cool product called MapHunt — a site that shows where products are being made on Product Hunt. I was totally not expecting the outpour of comments, tweets, and love from Product Hunt about MapHunt.

What’s interesting about MapHunt is how unsophisticated it is. At the core, it’s just a map of people’s Twitter profile locations, through their Product Hunt profile.

But people really made a connection with the product. Alexis Ohanian loved that it showcased people building outside SF/NYC. Another person wanted to organize a PH meetup in Perth, Australia. The fact that I have facilitated these connections and excitement is really empowering.

A lot of people think you need to do everything. Build feature after feature just to get the product out the door. Comments, likes, profiles, everything. But if you’re trying to create value, there’s no need for that. All you need is to create the bare minimum product that delivers value to people. Not a #fuckitshipit thing, but a good foundation from which you will iterate upon.

When you start at the very bottom, you give yourself room to evolve. That’s what great products need. They need to be able to evolve over time into something more mature.

Great products like Product Hunt and Twitter evolved from well-defined foundations. They built as much as needed to be useful to people, while giving themselves room to grow.

Build your foundation, not your finished product.