Coinbase founder Brian Armstrong says startups should keep shipping even before product-market-fit because action produces information. Like climbing a foggy mountain, you can only see a few steps ahead; taking them reveals what comes next, even if you have to backtrack.
Chapters
If you're pre product market fit. The best advice.
I have from that.
Period is action produces information. Keep doing stuff. Paul Graham had this great line. He was like, startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming, they die. So even if you're not sure what to do, like just do.
Anything because.
When you do it, it'll produce some information. People liked it.
They didn't.
This was very true for me. I just did something instead of debating it endlessly. And there was a couple times where like the minute I shipped it, I, I was like, I know we, we built this wrong, but now I have.
An idea of what to do next.
And, and I only would have had that idea if we'd actually gone through the exercise of going to build it. My, my other favorite analogy for this is that you're at the base of a mountain and you're looking up at.
The mountain and you're trying to think.
Okay, how do I get up there? But you can only see three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into.
The unknown.
And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you'll end up on some local maximum.
You'Ll have to retrace.
Your steps or whatever. But most people in life don't take the steps into.