When Shipping Matters More Than Building

I recently worked with a team that had spent four years building their product.

They shipped three times under different names, with scattered domains and abandoned channels as evidence. Brilliant builders, but they rarely tested in real markets. It reminded me of a chef locked in a kitchen for years, endlessly perfecting recipes, with only a few soft openings.

The founder believed new features and reward points would solve their cold-start problem.

I suggested a different path:

Ship, test, and educate new users first, before chasing the hardest existing audience who are already users of competitor products.

He disagreed. I was laid off.

But here’s what I learned from this two-week “workshop”:

• Ship > dream. If you don’t test in the real world, you lose touch with it.

• Beware confirmation bias. The facts you resist are often the ones you need.

• Echo chambers distort. What feels huge on social media may barely exist outside of it.

As Lulu Miller wrote in Why Fish Don’t Exist:

“Once we let go of the stars, we find the universe. So what happens when we let go of the fish?”

Sometimes the hardest part isn’t building — it’s letting go of building and actually shipping.