Nikil Viswanathan argues that speed is critical in startup development. He explains how fast iteration cycles in app development shaped his approach to crypto and enterprise work, and why moving quickly matters more than waiting for perfection.
Back in the day when you used to build iPhone apps, you had to get them approved by Apple. You still have to get them approved, but it used to be a two week process instead of like a one day process right now. So if you think about something like Snapchat or Facebook messenger, right? They will build a product. Let's say it takes two weeks to build a new version. You submit it to the App Store, it takes another two weeks to put in the App Store, then it's live. You get feedback for another two weeks from users, then you need to build another version, that's two weeks. Then you need to get approved in the App Store, it's another two weeks. So you're talking about like a two to two and a half month cycle, just do one iteration of your product, right? And we were like, that is not going to be work. That's not going to work for us. Right. Joe has this great quote which I think is like super spot on in startups and in the tech world, the big don't eat the small, the fast, eat the slow, right? So like speed is absolutely the most important thing and that is the number one thing you want to optimize for when you're doing a startup. So what we did is we took that two and a half month cycle, we cut it down, cut it down, cut it down until finally we kind of figured out the best way to do this is we would go to Berkeley and we would, we went to other college campuses also. But like we'd go to these college campus, we'd show people our app, we'd tell them we're just interns. Because if you tell them you made it, no one's going to tell you the actual feedback, they're just going to be nice to you. And we're like, yeah, we don't even care about this thing. Like give us feedback and we'd watch them use it and we'd sit down on the stairs at Sproul Plaza, plug our phones into our computers and recode the whole app, right? And then hit deploy and then go to the next person. So we cut that two month iteration cycle down into two and a half minutes. And like no one could compete with us, right? And we took that same kind of strategy to crypto and enterprise, which moves way slower than consumer social. And that's how we kind of dominated the space.
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