Why your product is failing: You're shipping too much #startup #business #marketing

30 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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In this short talk, Eric Siu argues that startups often fail because they focus on shipping as many features or products as possible, assuming that more output equals more success. He explains that while modern tools let any company build anything—from CRMs to SEO tools—the real problem is brand dilution: shipping everything makes a company known for nothing. Siu uses the "barrels versus ammunition" metaphor to illustrate that startups have limited "barrels" (capacity to execute) even if they have abundant "ammunition" (ideas). Consequently, they must prioritize "unshipping"—shutting down or killing initiatives quickly—to stay focused and avoid spreading resources too thin. He cites large firms like Coinbase, Robinhood, and Google as examples of companies that ship many products, but notes that startups cannot afford the same breadth. The core takeaway is that disciplined removal of low‑value work is more valuable than relentless addition of new features.

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Unshipping is actually more important than shipping today. So let me explain. So when you ship, you can build anything. You can build any product, you can build any CRM today, you can build any voicing, you can build any SEO tool, you can do whatever you want, right? The world is your oyster. Yeah. The problem with that is that when you start to ship everything, kind of similar to trying to create content for everything, you become known for nothing. And so even though you see companies like Coinbase shipping more than ever right now, you see Robinhood shipping more products than ever right now, right? You see Google shipping more products than ever. When you're a startup, you can't actually do that even though you can ship anything because you have very limited resources. We've talked about the concept of barrels versus ammunition, right? So ammunition, you might have a lot of ammunition, but you only have so many barrels that you can fire initiatives through. When you're a startup, you have less barrels than a large company and so you have to be even more focused than before and you have to focus on unshipping things and shutting things down quicker because we're in a world now where you can ship anything.