Let's Talk About The Worst Startup Advice I Ever Gave
For years, I preached the gospel of "launch fast." It was the default setting for every founder I knew, myself included. Got an idea? Build a weekend MVP. Get it out there. Let the market decide. Fail fast, iterate faster.
I told people this. I believed it. And I watched it slowly poison some of the most promising products I’ve ever seen.
Then I realized something: we were all asking the wrong question.
The Problem with "Failing Fast"
The whole "launch fast" movement is a reaction to a real problem: founders hiding in a garage for two years, building a masterpiece nobody wants. The advice is meant to save you from yourself.
But it has a nasty side effect.
I saw a founder post something that sent a shiver down my spine: "I put out my product before I even knew what it was... users discovered it and perverted the entire project to their ends."
That's the silent killer. When you launch a half-baked product, you don't just get feedback. You get an identity crisis. Your first users see your V0.1 not as a beta, but as the thing. And once they decide what your product is, good luck convincing them otherwise.
Imagine you're building a Porsche, but you launch the chassis with a lawnmower engine just to "get it out there." Your first customers won't give you feedback on the suspension; they'll complain that it cuts grass poorly.
That's how your vision dies. Not with a bang, but with a thousand support tickets asking for better lawnmower blades.
The Only Question That Actually Matters: Tool or Experience?
This isn't about features. It's about identity. The "launch fast" playbook only works for one kind of product, and most of us aren't building it. You have to ask yourself: am I building a tool or an experience?
A Tool does a job. It’s a file converter. A password generator. Its value is transactional. For tools, an MVP is perfect. Does it work? Ship it.
An Experience solves a problem in a specific way. The value isn't just the function, it's the feeling. The workflow. The aesthetics. The "magic moment" that makes a user's eyes light up.
If you launch an "experience" product like it's a "tool," you're dead on arrival.
Just look at the products we all know:
Notion: Launched as a "tool," it would've been just another Markdown editor. Yawn. The experience is turning a blank page into a LEGO set for your brain. That feeling of power and creativity is the product.
Dropbox: Launched as a "tool," it would've been a clunky FTP client. Instead, they focused on the experience: a "magic folder" that just worked. The simplicity was the entire innovation.
Duolingo: Launched as a "tool," it's a multiple-choice quiz app. Forgettable. The experience is a game. Streaks, leaderboards, and an owl that bullies you into learning. They solved the motivation problem, not just the vocabulary problem.
These companies understood their secret sauce wasn't a feature—it was a feeling. A workflow. An identity.
Forget the MVP. You Need a Minimum Viable Experience (MVE).
So if launching a skeleton of your product is a death sentence, what do you do? Hide for a year? No.
You shift your focus from a Minimum Viable Product to a Minimum Viable Experience.
The MVE isn't about the minimum number of features. It's about the minimum version that delivers the core emotional experience. It's the first chapter of your story, not the table of contents.
Here's how you find it:
Find the "Magic Moment." Every great experience has one. It’s the instant the user "gets it." For Dropbox, it was seeing a file sync for the first time. For Notion, it was making your first database. This moment is non-negotiable. It has to be in there.
Define Your Stance. What's the one thing you believe that your competitors don't? Are you radically simple? Built for collaboration? Unapologetically privacy-first? Your first version has to scream this from the rooftops.
Cut Everything Else. Seriously. Be ruthless. Does your beautiful journaling app need social sharing in V1? No. Does it need a public API? No. Does it need dark mode? Probably not.
The key: Your MVE should be narrow but deep. It does one thing perfectly and makes the user feel something. That feeling is what gets you your first true fans.
The Real Rules of Launching
Here’s another piece of startup gospel that needs to be thrown out: the idea that you only get one launch.
That’s nonsense. A launch isn't a single day; it's a rolling process.
The Alpha (Friends & Family): Show mockups or a clunky prototype to 5 people you trust. The only goal: Does the "magic moment" work?
The Closed Beta (The Waitlist): Let in 100 people who are genuinely excited about your vision. They'll forgive bugs because they've bought into the promise. Their feedback is gold.
The Open Beta (The Real World): Open the doors, but keep the "beta" tag. This is where you learn how your experience holds up at scale.
The V1.0 Launch (The "Big" One): This is your press tour. Your big announcement. By now, you're not launching an idea; you're launching a proven, polished experience with testimonials to back it up.
The key: Each wave of new users only sees what you have today. They don't know about the janky alpha. You get to make a first impression a dozen times.
Let's Be Honest: Is It Strategy or Fear?
I can hear the pushback now. A lot of founders use "building the experience" as a beautiful, elaborate excuse to avoid judgment. They're terrified their idea sucks.
You have to be brutally honest with yourself.
Are you hiding from feedback, or are you curating it for a specific group to test a hypothesis?
Are you adding "one more thing" because it's a distraction, or because it's essential to the core magic?
Can you explain your MVE in a single sentence? If not, you might be lost.
This isn't an excuse to build in a cave. It's a license to build with intention.
Getting Started (Without the Dogma)
Pick a side. On a piece of paper, write "Tool" or "Experience." If it's "Experience," describe the core feeling you're trying to create in one sentence.
Define your MVE. List the absolute bare minimum needed to deliver that feeling. What's the magic moment? That's your launch spec. Cut the rest.
Map your rolling launch. Forget one big day. Plan your Alpha, Beta, and V1.0. Who are you letting in at each stage, and what's the one thing you need to learn from them?
That’s it. No "fail fast" mantras. No shipping a soulless skeleton. Just building something with intention.
The Bottom Line
The "launch fast" gospel works when you're building a simple utility. But if you're trying to build something that people love, something with a point of view, launching too early is like showing a movie's rough cut to a test audience. They won't see the potential; they'll just see a bad movie.
The best products don't just solve a problem. They have a soul.
And you can't rush soul.