Halfway Between MVP and Perfection
#27 Halfway Between MVP and Perfection
This series is about what we’re learning, observing and experiencing while building our startup Saent (pronounce “Saint”). The good, the bad and especially the ugly, each time in under 5 minutes reading time.
The inside of a Saent.
There’s a worrying condition that’s going around the startup community. The Launch Clinic blog calls this troublesome ailment the Perfection Trap, and defines it as follows:
“A condition that occurs when a startup that is engineering focused […] has a fear of releasing a product that is less than perfect.”
There are a range of symptoms, but the most serious relate to constantly making changes to your product, effectively delaying shipping indefinitely. This sounds eerily familiar to us at Saent. Over the past few months, we made many changes to our product. We implemented a brand new user interface concept for the software. We added features that weren’t planned when we ran our crowdfunding campaign. We delayed Saent not once, but twice.
On the surface, it certainly looks like the diagnosis is dire: we’ve come down with the dreaded Perfection Trap. But as with most things that happen along the road to launching a startup, there’s more to it than meets the eye.
Good advice* Though well-intentioned, advice like that article from the Launch Clinic can be a big mindfck when you’re trying to build a new company. Every author, consultant and other “influencer” will present a method, best practices or even laws on what to do and what not to do. “Just follow these golden rules, and all will be well,” is the adage.
Yet every truly successful entrepreneur, artist or other “accomplished” human being will also tell you that greatness can’t be achieved by doing things exactly the same way as everyone else. In other words, you’ll have to follow most of the rules, but break the right ones at the right times to be unique and truly successful.
The Perfection Trap is one of those “golden rules,” and also an illustration of the mindf*ck at work. In Saent’s case, we certainly believe the condition is real, and it might seem we’re suffering from it. But another age old saying runs counter to it. It goes like this:
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”
This is especially true in today’s busy world, with millions of apps, ads, messages, projects and other activities constantly jockeying for your attention. How often do you give a product a second chance? I bet it’s not very often. And if you do, it is likely because at least something about it made an impression on you the first time.
So is Saent falling for the Perfection Trap? Ultimately, no, because we’re now certainly shipping. We’re in the process of expanding our beta pool from a few dozen early backers to hundreds and then thousands of users. We’re also getting ready to ship the Saent button to all of our backers in April. We didn’t fall for the Perfection Trap, but we easily could have.
Our new conversational software interface.
The key to keeping away from the trap is to find the right balance between shipping and improving, while also not running out of cash (brinkmanship anyone?). We based our decision to pursue a new interface on our hunch that it would be a ten times better experience . We decided that the improved user experience unlocked by our conversational UI was more important than being sure to get every feature we had initially planned in our first release. We could easily have fallen into the Perfection Trap by trying to pursue this new UI, if it hard turned out to be a dud, or by obsessing over getting each of those features into the final version.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating though; we’ll only know if this truly was the right decision when all our backers turn into happy users in April! (We’ll certainly report back to you by then.)
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