Speed Is Your Only Advantage

Building a startup is like throwing darts blindfolded from 20 feet away.

You could either calculate every variable for one perfect throw.

Or you could “just throw a lot of fucking darts really quickly.”

The former is founders who spend months perfecting their product. The latter is the “ship fast” crowd. Guess who wins.

For early-stage founders, speed creates three powerful advantages:

1. Dramatically accelerates learning: With each "throw," you gather data on what works. Every miss helps you calibrate your aim for the next attempt vs. perfecting a single shot that completely misses the mark.

2. Outpaces competitors: Test more hypotheses in less time.

3. Overcome analysis paralysis: Technical founders especialy fall into the trap of adding features before launch, thinking "I'll try it once I add this button," only to never actually test their core assumptions with real users.

So how do you ship faster?

Han Wang, Co-Founder and CEO of Mintlify - whom I had this discussion with, shared four tactics to maximize shipping velocity:

• Embrace embarrassment: If you’re not embarrassed of the 1st version, you shipped it too late. Strip your idea to its atomic core. What's the one thing that must exist to test whether people want this?

• Time-box ruthlessly: If you can't build a testable version in two weeks, your hypothesis is too complex. Break it down further. Don’t believe this can be done? Han and Mintlify built and launched the first version of the product that got them to PMF (after 8 pivots) over a single weekend.

• Ship to real users immediately: Not friends. Not advisors. People who might pay. Their behavior - not feedback - is your only reliable signal.

• Make decisions on usage, not promises: If retention sucks, iterate. The “perfect feature” that fixes everything hardly ever exists.

Unfortunately, too many founders resist this. Perfectionism often masquerades as 'user experience.’

Every feature you add before launch is a guess. Every week of polish is a week not learning. Every delay reduces your number of attempts with the limited runway you have.

If you ship fast on the other hand, each iteration teaches you something. Each experiment improves your aim. Speed compounds.

Your competitive advantage isn't what you build. It's how fast you learn.

(PS: This also applies - though to a lesser degree - to industries with safety etc concerns).

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Enjoyed reading this?

Then check out my conversation on the focal podcast with Han Wang, the Co-founder & CEO of Mintlify, who truly knows IF, WHEN, and HOW to pivot with speed and conviction. A lesson he learned the hard way: Mintlify pivoted 8 pivots in 14 months before finding Product-Market-Fit.

Youtube | Apple Podcast | Spotify

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