I wrote the following to a startup that I invested in. As I was re-reading it, I realize it applies broadly. The context is that this is a technical founder set that is pre-product and pre-revenue. It’s lightly edited for clarity and anonymity.

Note to a founder

Hey, so I gave some more thought about what we were talking about yesterday.

I am convicted that you’re too detached from a user workflow and just building infrastructure without a clear connection point to the user. You must connect to that user workflow either in ‘developer world’ or in ‘end user world’.

Maybe I’m biased because of my own recent experiences, but a strong death knell for a business is a lack of a concrete connection to that user workflow.

If you’ve got a functional (end to end) foundation for your technology, it’s time to get it into the parket. it’s more paramount for you all because you have differentiated technology, if you don’t get into the market and get feedback on that foundation, then you’re probabilistically going to end up iterating in the wrong direction.

This quote came to mind in our conversation yesterday.

“More startups die of indigestion than starvation”1

Given that context, you need to move to ship something quickly. If only to kickstart the feedback loop.

The longer you defer that, the greater risk for objectively little gain. What matters is end users thoughts on quality, not strictly your own. That doesn’t mean ship garbage but it does mean get feedback to align your thinking with your users. It may be that you get some feedback that it is not good enough but at least then you can prioritize what things would make it better, not just intellectually debating within your team about what would make it better.2

You also de-risk the user experience because you’re going to understand what things make sense as you connect to the user workflow.

Get into the market and see what your ICP responds to.

No more hyper-intellectualism, Your problems right now are too abstract.

Just ship and see how they respond.

Footnotes

  1. https://barrypopik.com/blog/more_companies_die_of_indigestion_than_starvation ↩

  2. The quality thing is tough. Do not ship garbage. However, you do need to get it out there. Call it alpha, set expectations, but see if your customers think it’s garbage. Trust your instincts but set a deadline and cut scope to get it out. Reduced scope != reduced quality. ↩