Start with validation, not perfection

Build less, learn more.

After more than eight years working in product, if there’s one lesson I keep coming back to, it’s this: don’t invest in technology or design before validating your idea.

There are exceptions, of course. If technology or design is the core of your idea, if it’s the thing that makes your product different, then investing early makes sense. But most of the time, it’s not. And that’s where many of us, including me, have made costly mistakes.

It’s very easy to get caught up in imagining the ideal version of your product. The sleek design. The elegant tech stack. The perfectly crafted experience. We tell ourselves that 60% isn’t good enough, so we aim for 100% right away. But more often than not, that mindset leads to ending up with zero.

We obsess over every edge case and scenario for a product that, in reality, nobody has asked for yet. And while 50–60% might not sound like enough, it’s usually more than enough to understand whether the idea has legs. From there, you can push it to 75%, then 90%, in a way that actually matters.

I learned this the hard way. I was once part of a team that spent countless evenings, Friday nights, and weekends debating tiny details of a feature set that never had an audience. We built beautiful, complex technology that no one cared about. The punchline? Three years later, that same technology was available to anyone.

That’s how fast things move. Technology catches up. Design trends evolve. What stays constant is whether people actually want what you’re building.

So before you sink your energy into building the perfect product, make sure there’s real demand for it. Find your product–market fit. Launch something imperfect but valuable. Learn from how people use it. Then build on top of that.

Perfection can wait. Validation can’t.