If you’re spending months polishing a product before launch, you’re wasting time and money.
We learned this firsthand at Mobility Places. We started with absolute confidence in who our users were and what they needed. Reality hit us in the face within weeks of shipping — the customer we built for wasn’t the customer who showed up. Launching early let us pivot to the audience we actually had. If we’d waited to build the perfect thing, we’d have burned months and a meaningful chunk of runway on the wrong product for the wrong market.
Eric Ries said it years ago in The Lean Startup: if you’re not slightly embarrassed by your first release, you’ve waited too long. He was right then and he’s still right.
Quality matters. In the early stages, feedback matters more. Early adopters don’t care that the rough edges are still rough. They care that you’re solving the thing that’s hurting them right now. Every week you spend polishing is a week you’re not learning what to polish.
With the AI tools available now, the cost of shipping has collapsed. A small team can do in weeks what used to take months. So when an early-stage company says it needs another quarter to “get it right,” what it usually needs is a user.
Ship early. Listen. Then ship again.