My co-contributors to 8020startup Sachin, Evan and Andrew have each given their perspectives on striking the right balance between getting the product out the door and getting it right as far as bugs are concerned. But I want to discuss bugs from a different perspective, namely, the psychological impact bugs have on the entrepreneurs and employees of a startup. 

Bugs don't just affect customers, they affect the product creators as well, especially at small startups. Entrepreneurs are parents and startups are their children. Hence, startups are no day job. You are breathing life into something which previously did not exist and that takes 24/7 dedication. True entrepreneurs don't go home at the end of the day and say to themselves "Wow, that latest version of our software I shipped today was complete crap. Glad that's over." This means that if one of us ships a bug and fifty people complain about it every single one of those complaints is taken personally--the entrepreneurial equivalent of being told your baby is sick. Each and every complaint hurts. You don't want your baby to be sick! You want him/her to be perfect!

Some of these complaints hurt worse than others. Yes, you already knew that when someone uses your product while simultaneously running an OS/2 Warp emulator, all of the drop shadows on your icons would disappear. Fine! You were mentally prepared for that one and had made an explicit decision that it was worth shipping that bug. (And for those of you who have never worked at a tech company before...every product you've ever bought has a known bug list that is usually made up of tens, if not hundreds or thousands of bugs.) That's like being told your baby has dry skin. No biggie.

The one's that really hurt, however, are usually 1) the ones you didn't see coming and 2) ones you misjudged in magnitude. These are the ones end users get angry and complain about. That end user anger is translated into entrepreneurial guilt. You feel terrible you didn't fix that bug before it shipped and now your customer just had your application crash and lose the 30,000 page research paper the customer had dedicated his/her life to (all without saving of course) which was also about to cure cancer. Now you're worried that all of this customer anger will reach a crescendo and impair the future success of your startup/baby.

Don't underestimate the impact this will have on your life as an entrepreneur. These sorts of situations can really ruin a day and contribute to why being an entrepreneur is so tough. Starting a company feels like a rollercoaster especially early on. Nasty, customer-affecting bugs are often the trough in the rollercoaster. When customers suffer you do too. 

My advice when prioritizing bug lists is this, ask yourself, "How will I feel when we get hundreds of frantic emails and DMs from customers complaining about this bug? WIll I slough it off and say 'Tough luck it's just a drop shadow' or will it turn into 'AntennaGate' and ruin the rest of my night or week?" That's at least one way of gut-checking how you're prioritizing your bugs.

Remember, the bugs affect you too.