We're warming up for the October Release before Ready event in Mexico City. The event is sold out with more participants than ever. I'm thrilled about what's coming and what we can create together. We'll see many people building products from scratch, adding features to their startup products, and doing Release with the entire community.

As we explored in the previous blog post about Release, there's a magical moment when the creator takes courage and shares their work with the community. It's that instant where your code stops being just yours to become a shared experience, where you make that leap of faith and deliver your creation—imperfect, incomplete, but real—to others.

But Release is just the beginning. What happens next is where the real magic occurs: the community receives that creation and nurtures it with feedback. It's a beautiful cycle where the individual act of creating transforms into a collective process of evolution and improvement. You might even gain users who will continue testing what you create for the following weeks.

In Release before Ready, we've learned that this exchange has a dimension that goes beyond code and deploys. After months organizing events and seeing hundreds of demos, there are two fundamental skills I'd like to highlight to cultivate them deliberately in community: knowing how to give feedback with empathy and receive it with curiosity.

These aren't skills taught in bootcamps or universities. They're creative muscles we develop project by project, demo by demo, conversation by conversation. And while they're complex to master, they're what convert a simple event into a space of genuine creation.

Giving feedback is one of the most complex skills we must nurture as a community. It requires first that we can see beyond the bugs, beyond the incomplete interfaces, beyond the missing features, to find the essence of what the creator is trying to build.

Imagine testing an app that clearly lacks many things. The buttons aren't aligned, some functions don't respond, the database resets every time you refresh the page. It's easy to make a list of everything that's wrong. What's difficult—and valuable—is identifying what's useful and powerful in that imperfect prototype.

At one of our recent events, Didier was working with Replit on an idea catalog. The interface looked incredible, ideas could be created and cataloged efficiently, each with its own todo-list. When I asked where the data was being saved, we discovered everything was in memory—each refresh deleted everything. Instead of pointing this out as a fundamental error, the conversation became "what if we add a database?". Minutes later, with Replit's help, he already had PostgreSQL running and data persisting.

That's the kind of feedback that transforms. It's not "it's poorly made," but "look how incredible it would be if...".

Being able to mentally trace the path from what you just tested to what it could become requires trained imagination. It requires testing incomplete products, watching them grow little by little and seeing how they mature before our eyes. This is complicated, it's easy to see today's Reddit or Docker and forget the product we used years ago when it was unstable and lacking everything.

I'll repeat it once more: it requires having seen products evolve from rough prototypes to growing into polished applications. It requires understanding that behind each line of code there's a person who decided to invest their time in creating something that didn't exist before. It requires having seen someone's stubbornness in polishing their product day by day and feature by feature.

Identifying that potential is only half the path. True mastery lies in communicating that feedback with genuine empathy. At RbR, we all come with the same spirit of creating and sharing, which facilitates this empathetic connection. We can easily put ourselves in the other person's shoes, all our products have the same amount of missing things. Still, it's a muscle we must exercise constantly and how easy it is to fail at this, I say from experience.

The best feedback isn't the one that points out errors, but the one that opens possibilities. When someone tells you "what if you add this?" or "imagine if it could do that?", they're not criticizing what's missing; they're co-creating, they're seeing your vision based on what they just tested and adding layers of potential the creator might not have seen.

I remember when Sergio saw my Hacker News crawler—basically a boring data collection—and suggested: "What if we give it a tabloid look?". He wasn't saying my version was wrong. He was seeing something I couldn't see, he was adding a creative dimension that completely transformed the project into Weaving News.

As a community, we're learning that the most valuable feedback comes wrapped in curious questions:

• "What would happen if...?"
• "Have you considered...?"
• "I'd love to be able to..."
• "How would you see adding...?"
• "Can you imagine if it also...?"

These aren't disguised criticisms, they're invitations to expand the original vision. They're doors that open toward possibilities the creator might not have contemplated.

When Davo showed his PR review tool, Lulo suggested: "What if the reviews had more personality?". It wasn't a criticism of the existing functionality, it was an invitation to explore a playful dimension that ended up being the most memorable moment of the demo when Davo included Linus Torvalds' personality in his app—creator of git and Linux, one of the toughest and most experienced code reviewers in the world.

If giving feedback is complicated, receiving it is even more challenging. As creators, we quickly marry our vision. We've spent hours thinking about every detail, every flow, every design decision. When someone suggests something different, our first instinct may be defensive.

It's natural. You've been awake until 3 AM debugging that function. You've redesigned that interface five times. You've thought about every edge case, every possible failure, every user experience. Your project is your baby, and when someone suggests changes, the first impulse is to explain why your way is correct.

But here's the problem: that marriage to our initial vision can blind us to extraordinary opportunities.

The feedback we frequently receive goes in directions we never contemplated. Someone wants to use your task management app as a personal diary. Another suggests converting your analysis tool into a game. A third sees in your chatbot prototype the potential to revolutionize education. Each suggestion is a window into how others perceive and reimagine your creation.

The natural temptation is to explain why those ideas don't fit your vision, why they'd be technically complicated, why they deviate from your application's main objective. But the real power lies in making curiosity your first reaction, not defense.

Receiving feedback with genuine curiosity means training your mind so that its first impulse isn't to justify, but to ask. It's developing the habit of responding with "How interesting! Tell me more about that" instead of "Yes, but... no". It's that fundamental change where your first internal question stops being "How do I explain my decision?" and becomes "What is this person seeing that I don't see?".

If your first reaction is curiosity with "How do you imagine it would work?", that simple question will lead you to discover much more than you've imagined, opening doors to possibilities that now become a central part of your project. Each piece of feedback, even the one that seems to go in the opposite direction of your vision, contains a seed of valuable information about how your creation impacts others.

When someone says "it would be great if I could export to PDF", they're not just asking for a feature. They're telling you they see value in your tool beyond the prototype, that they want to take your creation to other contexts, that they trust what you built so much they want to integrate it into their workflow.

When they suggest "what if it were collaborative?", they're not complicating your simple architecture. They're telling you they see your tool as so useful they want to share it with their teams.

This process of receiving feedback with openness doesn't mean implementing every suggestion. It means allowing those suggestions to nurture and expand your original vision. It's an act of creative humility to recognize that your initial idea is only the starting point, not the final destination.

In the case of Weaving News, I was focused on efficient data aggregation. The pure, clean, technically elegant vision. Sergio saw a digital tabloid. That vision wasn't in my plans, it went against my minimalist aesthetic of "only the data matters". But by receiving it with curiosity instead of resistance, the project transformed into something much more interesting and unique.

If I had defended my original vision of "it's just a tech news aggregator", I would have lost the opportunity to create something truly distinctive. Today, the tabloid look is what makes Weaving News memorable, what differentiates it from a thousand other news aggregators. This style brings a smile to my face every time I read it in the morning, and that's worth gold.

Think of feedback not as criticism but as navigation data. When you're driving with Waze and it says "recalculating", it's not because you've failed as a driver. It's information that helps you reach your destination, sometimes by a path you didn't even know existed.

The most beautiful thing about cultivating these two skills is that they reinforce each other. The better you give feedback, the more you appreciate the value of the feedback you receive. The more open you are to receiving suggestions, the better you understand how to give them constructively.

At RbR, we see this back-and-forth of feedback and people collaborating constantly. The people who give the best feedback tend to be the most receptive when it's their turn to receive it. They've learned that feedback isn't a judgment about your capacity as a creator, but fuel for your creative process.

This dynamic creates an environment where failing is safe, where showing incomplete work is celebrated, where the craziest ideas find curious ears instead of critical ones. It's a space where we're all simultaneously teachers and students, creators and users, visionaries and collaborators.

These skills don't develop in a vacuum. They're cultivated at each event, at each demo, in each post-RbR conversation. Each time someone new joins RbR, they bring with them a fresh perspective that enriches our collective capacity to give and receive feedback.

If there's something we've learned in these months, it's that feedback, when given and received with the right attitude, isn't an evaluation—it's an act of co-creation. It's the way we as a community elevate each individual's work, transforming good ideas into extraordinary projects.

The next time you're at an event, remember: your feedback could be the spark that transforms a project. And that suggestion you're about to reject could be the key to taking your creation to the next level.

Because in the end, at Release before Ready we're not just building products. We're building a culture where creating, sharing, giving, and receiving are equally important parts of the creative process. And in that process, we all grow.