Startup founders should aim for 45-day release cycles instead of long builds. Faster iterations let you learn from customers quicker and reach product-market fit sooner. You need three things: the ability to release often, quick customer feedback, and the speed to turn that feedback into changes.
Chapters
As a founder, there's a lot of things out of your control, so much out of your control. But there are a few things in your control. And the number one thing you will hear from second time entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs that have scaled their business, people who've been there down there, is the one thing that you can control, that can drive your business forward the fastest is your clock speed.
What this is is how quickly can you release a product, get feedback, understand that feedback, iterate your product and get it back out to the market again. Some people call that the OODA loop. You can call it whatever you want. The point being is the more times you iterate and the more times you deliver and the more learning you get, the more likely your product is going to get to the place you need it to get to. So you can spend six months building a product and releasing it to find out it's the wrong product, or you can spend 45 days and then do it again the next 45 days and again the next 45 days. Which one's going to deliver you more insights and value? Which one's going to get you closer to product market fit to product market price fit to delivering on what your customers actually need? It's going to be through that iteration, loop, clock speed. How quickly can you build, learn, re release and do it all over again? If you can control your clock speed, you will win quicker. And to do that load of requirements, load of requirements, One of them, how quickly you can actually release as an organization, technical capabilities, your release cycle, your engineering release cycle, what it takes to actually get through the pipeline technically. The second is how quickly you can actually gain those insights from your customers. Whether you're using tools, whether you're using interviews, where you're using conversations, how quickly you can take that learning and turn it into something that you can actually use and leverage. And the third is how quickly you can then convert that into an iterative capability or a change or an adjustment in your product to meet that need. Good luck.
