Cut the right corners

It's the easiest thing in the world to delay launching a new feature. The real art of being a founder is learning to cut the right corners. Your product needs to be functional and demonstrate value, but it doesn't need to have every possible feature from day one.

Think of your complete product as a huge ocean: boiling it all at once would take forever and isn't practical. Instead, when you're just starting out, aim to boil something much smaller, like a swimming pool. That should be enough to demonstrate value, excite users, and get them onboard. If you try boiling the entire ocean from day one, you'll end up chasing perfection for months, maybe even years, before anyone sees real value.

For instance, when we shipped design mode, it handled the common use cases well, but it wasn't perfect at all. Parking space widths weren't adjustable (many would argue that it is a must have feature), and there was no support for ADA-compliant parking spots, which are legally required. But even in its incomplete state, users instantly understood its value: creating layouts with this thing was wayyy faster than the tools they were using. The main takeaway here is to ship something imperfect and iterate based on real user feedback than to try building the product all the way to perfection. Now, after several iterations guided by actual user requests, people tell us they'd never go back to spending an hour on something they can do in minutes.

In short, your goal should always be to shorten iteration cycles. Users need value now, not four months from now.

Imperfect: I realize the term imperfect is subjective in the context of product development. For me, it means your product needs to be functional, bug free, and valuable from day one. But it doesn't need to be 100% valuable to all users but valuable enough for a small subset of users to get where you're headed.