The first feature, still not public

Collections was the first thing I built for Edicek. First week of the project. I needed to start somewhere, and I'm used to organizing stuff, so I made folders where people could save things by category.

Eight months later, I shipped the iOS app. Collections wasn't in it. It sat behind a feature flag where nobody could see it.

Three people out of the first five asked where collections were. They wanted Instagram-style folders. Simple. Manual. Pick a folder, save the thing, done.

But I didn't want to ship it. Not like that. It felt incomplete.

The problem was, most people I know don't like organizing their stuff. They won't maintain folders. So I thought, what if collections were smart? You create one, name it, describe what should go inside, and the AI sorts everything for you. You just write why you're saving something, and it figures out which collection it belongs to. No manual filing.

That felt like the right version. The one worth building.

So I kept it hidden. Worked on other things. Figured I'd come back to smart collections when I had time.

A week ago, I turned it on for myself. Just to see what state it was in.

I haven't used it. Not once.

Because without the smart part, it doesn't make sense to me. Manual collections feel like busy work. Like the kind of thing that sounds useful but ends up abandoned after three weeks.

But those three people didn't ask for smart collections. They asked for dumb ones. They wanted the "worse" version I'm holding back.

Maybe founder perfectionism isn't just about polish. Maybe it's also about holding features hostage until they match your vision, even when users would be fine with less.

I still don't know if I'll ship it as-is. It still doesn't feel integrated into the rest of the app. But I'm starting to wonder if "not ready" means "not ready for users" or just "not ready for me."