The 100 steps analogy for avoiding perfectionism
There is one common pitfall many founders or indiehackers fall into when it comes to launching their product/startup: Perfectionism 🎯 .
Perfectionism makes you work on your product, believing that it's still not good enough for your customers, and that you should:
- 🎁 add this new shiny feature that would change everything
- ✨polish the design until it's so beautiful your customers won't resist browsing
- 👨💻clean the code until there is no bugs left, only clean code you would be delighted to see everyday
This pitfall has been discussed a lot in all his different aspects by many successful entrepreneurs, indiehackers or developers, such as:
- Paul Graham in his essays
- Pieter Levels in his book on how to successfully be an indiemaker
- Dan Abramov on his article regarding clean code
But today, I'm going to give a simple analogy to understand why it's a common pitfall, and more specifically, why we try to avoid it. It was given to me by successful founder Francescu Santoni, back when I was working at mojo, a YC backed company.
Let’s assume the perfect product for your customers is ahead of you, in a definite distance of 100 steps. However, you don't know for sure where precisely (otherwise you would be able to guess the lottery and you wouldn't need to build a product 😉).
It means that the real perfect product for your customers is somewhere 100 steps in front of you, but can be anywhere in an angle of possibilities.
This angle represents each feature, design polishing and code cleaning combination you could do to reach the perfect product, and there is an infinity of that. Each step will be an iteration on your product, but you can only confirm a step is correct if you actually ship it to your customers and it becomes live 🚀.
We will start by making only one step in any direction, and we ship it.
If customers are happy and/or KPIs move in the right directions, it means we are correct, and everything is fine.
But it's not really a big deal even if you're wrong.
Indeed, you can correct your direction pretty easily as you dont have much momentum in the wrong way. Even in the worst case scenario where you went in the totally opposed direction in the angle, the amount of work to correct your path is still small.
If you move 50 steps ahead however, it becomes really hard to correct and go back on track if it proves wrong, because the distance between your path and the correct path grows at each step. In the worst case scenario, it becomes the entire arc of the angle, which is quite big now.
Although simple, this analogy describes very well why you should avoid perfection. Each shipping is a validation you’re in the correct path, no matter how small the step is. Perfection for you is not the same than perfection for your customer, and the best way to remember that is every time you think:
- "omg, this product is damn simple, how can they make so much money with it?" (see RemoteOK compared to other job boards)
- "omg, this product is so ugly, how can they make so much money with it?" (see Zoom compared to the competition like Skype or Microsoft Teams)
- "omg, their code is so buggy, how can they make so much money with it?" (see Steam when launched with HL2)
Or phrased otherwise: The Best Is The Enemy Of The Good.
If you have any question, you can AMA in the comments 😊.
If you loved this post, don't hesitate to follow me on Twitter.
This post is an extraction of my response on @briancldo original post regarding looking for perfection before shipping.
Great post, thanks for making it!
Another angle is that if you absolutely have to be a perfectionist, you can get away with it if your scope is extremely small. In other words, if your product is tiny and simple.
I did this for Indie Hackers. It was just a blog at first. There wasn't much surface area, and very few features. So I could afford to go really deep perfecting and nitpicking over the design before launch, because that only took a couple of days.
Thanks a lot ! 🙇
Indeed, I agree being a perfectionist can work if you focus on doing one simple things perfectly well and it doesn't consume much time to perfect it.
The broader the scope, the worse it becomes to be a perfectionist.
The problem with perfectionism is really into that one feature you can't wait to add and you always come up with new stuff and the scope becomes too broad and just lose yourself in a product that never goes live 😄
Congrats on IndieHackers by the way 👏, I really love the platform and I'm in love with the indie community ❤️
Reducing scope is much easier than trying not to be perfect.
I liked the analogy, am about to start working on a new SaaS product, I started by looking to the top 5 competitors and I ended up with a huge list of ideas how to create the perfect product that can compete with them. I sat back and realized that I can never realize that any time soon (being a solo full stack developer my self). I always suffered from the perfectionism syndrome with my previous projects. This post came just in time to remind me not to fall for that again.
Nice visual explanation. One of my all time favourite posts on this topic is "If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good." by Paul Buchheit - http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2010/02/if-your-product-is-great-it-doesnt-need.html
Didn't know about that post, thanks for sharing 🙇
Yeah this was great - I hadn't seen it either!
I thought I had my perfectionism under control but I didn't realise that years of working for clients had moved my Overton Window of what is acceptable for a minimum viable product.
Big clients want things on brand, pixel-perfect. Even if they think they're making a MVP, they're not.
As an ex-contractor, it took me a long time to realise that it's better to find the fastest, dirtiest way to validate a product idea than to add too much polish once it basically works. Instead of spending all my time in design and code, now I am putting out product ideas that solve a problem and I cover any user interface issues by providing clear usage instructions as videos and blog posts. Here's an example - I had a tool I'd made for myself but it didn't feel like a "real" app. Yesterday I made a video showing how to use it, warts and all, and as a result I've already had feedback from people that will make it much easier to improve if I decide to work on it more.
Two years ago, this process was done to me without my really understanding what was happening - one of my apps, very much a MVP, took off without me doing anything, but it's taken me this long to realise that I'd got it right by releasing the bare minimum, with all the subsequent features I've added being derived directly from conversations with my users. It's just a better way to live. For your bank balance and your self-worth.
That's great insight @michaelforrest!
I understand that, and I totally agree when you work as a contractor, you tend to forget that pixel-perfect, shiny features and big expectations are not MVPs 😄
Although, even with small clients, willing to grow their startup, it's often a common bias I encounter, mostly because there is a big emotional attachment to the product, and obviously money dependency 💸.
That's one of the main reason I insist that much on this topic, and I feel this article can help other indies get the grasp, that on the long run, perfectionism is the worst enemy you can have, as it does not make things better, but worse 99% of the time 😊
This is a great post. I pick things up alot better when they're visual, so this helped me solidify my understanding more than some of the articles I've read on the topic👍
Thank you, I'm glad it's useful 😊
Perfect! Lol
I noticed that as time goes by you get better as a consultant, developer. You think that since you are better and more experienced you can snick one more thing to make a product have more quality, however, this is misleading. You will have to support this "one thing" even if no one is using it or worse, if only a small portion will use it and it will be hard to take out. I totally agree that you have to be brutal in the bare minimum requirements and refactor as required. True, it won't look good, won't behave well but it will be just what your current users need and you will be able to provide more features for your new users faster.
Great take.
I think what you are describing is "the perfect product for your users" and not perfectionism. I have a problem with perfectionism but I am ok with starting smaller and getting feedback with each iteration...as long as each small iteration is perfect.
However, what I am not okay with is knowing that there is a trivial bug that exist, the spacing for the element is not pixel perfect, the app doesn't look how I expect in this specific device. Those things can all take a lot of time to fix and user's will most likely not event notice the fixes.
I think there are more indies like myself than there are indies that is creating one huge platform all at once before showing anyone.
Nice post, thanks for sharing it!
The post was a great read, though it took me some time to figure out the graphics. I think they can be more clear :)
They definitely can, I'm a poor designer 😸
If you or anyone in the community wanna help with that, feel free to ping me and send me some replacements that would be clearer/more design-friendly 😊
By the way, those designs are also a great example of the point of the post: just ship as it is, and improve later if it brings value 💪
so true
This is an incredible post. I get things alot better when they're visual, so this assisted me with cementing my seeing more than a portion of the articles I've perused on the topic👍
那本书看上去不错
I am (or have been?) a perfectionist and it has been bad for me in a lot of times. But over the years I have realized that perfectionism is your future. The end goal you should work towards. Not a show stopper. This simple thing took me a while to realize. It is still damn hard to do this in practice. But reading this gave me some positivity. Thanks a lot for writing it.
perfection is the enemy of Good
Thanks for writing this. 👍
Great post! Very timely for me. I really appreciated the graphics and references to other essays and threads. 👍
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.