I frequently hear these two arguments against releasing early and often:
1) You will have a primitive product with bugs which means that the people who see it will be turned off and not want to come back later.
2) The argument made in this post, namely that you loose focus and end up putting out fires and implementing feature requests all the time.
As for #1, I just think that it matters very much because the group of early adopters is going to be very small anyway, unless you do some hyped launch like Cuil. Therefore, loosing a couple of users for good can be a small price to pay for the highly valuable feedback that you are bound to get.
#2 is something you have to be concerned about but that doesn't mean that you have to let it control you. And once something is launched, you are bound to get feedback anyway, so it really only applies to the "release early"-part.
As for #1, I just think that it matters very much because the group of early adopters is going to be very small anyway, unless you do some hyped launch like Cuil. Therefore, loosing a couple of users for good can be a small price to pay for the highly valuable feedback that you are bound to get.
#2 is something you have to be concerned about but that doesn't mean that you have to let it control you. And once something is launched, you are bound to get feedback anyway, so it really only applies to the "release early"-part.