Go fast and break things, or move slow and steady?
Lightš”
26 replies
So many sides to this debate, curious where people here land.
Personally, I prefer slow and steady. Better perspective, allows you to be more thoughtful about each step, and mistakes are generally not compounded. But when I was younger it was more full-throttle, iterate and fix as fast as possible, so my approach now might be a maturity thing that we all evolve into more or less.
What do you think?
Replies
Sjoerd Handgraaf@sjoerdhandgraaf
Sharetribe
I prefer "a marathon, not a sprint."
But it's not always your choice.
If you're building in an industry in a hype cycle (e.g. AI right now), speed probably improves the chances of survival.
Same if your startup requires you to raise external funding: investors prefer speed.
Share
From my personal experience, it depends on your product and the market you're in.
If you're in a market that's rapidly exploding, then it's best to jump in as quickly as possible because the hype is very important. At this time, the competition is about how to capture more heat and traffic while making fewer mistakes, but it's very likely that mistakes are inevitable. We need to have sharp judgment and quick reactions to the mistakes we make.
If the market is already relatively mature or hasn't been cultivated yet, then you need to be slow and steady, think clearly about the user's needs, aim for your target, use your resources more efficiently, make fewer mistakes, and serve every customer well to ensure they stick around.
@rick_fan agree with this Rick. A lot of the value in moving fast is to be found in a new market when your idea is yet to be validated. If your MVP gets 0 traction you can drop the idea and move on, rather than investing in the full version. On the other hand if you're going into an established market where demand is well known then taking shortcuts at the beginning will more likely cost you in the long run for very little gain.
@rick_fan @al_gordon I think for me it's more of a general mindset: how do you work, regardless of the product or market. Do you rush and cut corners at any cost and then clean it up, or do you work more deliberately. I just see so many founders falling into a more-faster-now mode and it causes so much anxiety and burnout. But it's fluid, right? And a spectrum, so it's an interesting conversation....
Last Plannr
I'll go slow and steady now. Went fast and broke shit, broke shit really bad. It's created a ton of problems and cleaning up the mess is not fun.
I think the trick is in scenario mapping the cost and scale of any possible cleanup job required after 'breaking things'. There are some breakages which are easy and relatively painless to fix (refunding customers before a product is shipped for example) and others which are far more serious, such as shipping a faulty/untested product.
Slow and steady wins the race! However, I believe sometimes, we do need speed š
@vivek_equp I agree with this provided you're validating with real customers as you go. Slow and steady is great until you realise you've spent 2 years working on something that nobody wants!
IXORD
Move slowly and steadily, so carefully develop a plan.
Slow and steady feels more sustainable, allowing for innovation without the constant fear of things falling apart.
@sumcollins_ it is, and it's a mindset. Fomo is a real thing, and it adds too much stress to founders. Push, be deliberate, but no point in breaking speed records. You could crash....
My learning has been that there are no free lunches. So make sure you have a solid product, there is heavy price to pay later on otherwise
PerceptInsight
My learning has been that there are no free lunches. So make sure you have a solid product, there is heavy price to pay later on otherwise
@kaushik_mukherjee1 agree with this. Even if your first release is incomplete (in terms of your vision for the product) it should at least be solid and reliable.
Absolutely resonates with my journey too! Used to be all about the speed, creating a rough skeleton, and then diving back to fine-tune.
Now, it's that sweet spotāquick placeholders to get the ball rolling, then a meticulous journey into each component. Optimization becomes an art, right? And that iterative process, introducing new methodologies, classes, entitiesālike upgrading the code's DNA. It's the fusion of speed and quality that crafts a robust application.
Anyone else finding their groove in this balance of velocity and craftsmanship? Let's swap stories and strategies!
it highly depends if you are a solo builder or a team if you ask me. You really cannot afford to ship a broken product if you are a solo developer because you might not have the power to put all the fires out :)
I prefer slow and steady. Or even slow and intermittent. I remember the dot com boom, and I can't think of any company that succeeded by going fast.
@jen_from_accomplist yup, completely agree. I think this is really important to nudge young founders to strike a balance and move deliberately. Today if you move too fast you actually might arrive too soon, many great founder stories about being a 'zebra' and waiting for the right opportunities to mature!
@light_silver And sometimes arriving too soon can end up delaying progress. I recently realized that Kozmo.com was just Instacart that no one had thought through. If they'd just taken the time to figure out to make it work, we wouldn't have had to wait. Since Kozmo predated smart phones, if they had pulled it off back then, we might not have the gig economy now. Without apps to allow workers to clock in whenever, they would've had to stick with full time employees - which would be better for workers and for consumers (esp when you need something from the drug store at 3am and no one is InstaCarting near you).