Here's a lesson that took me years and multiple failed products to fully internalize: fast shipping beats perfect planning every single time.
I've launched 8+ products at this point. Some I obsessed over for 6 months, perfecting every feature, tweaking every pixel, adding "just one more thing" before launch. Others I forced myself to ship in 2 weeks with barely functional MVPs.
The results? The products I shipped in 2-4 weeks outperformed the ones I built for 6 months by 5X MRR.
Let that sink in.
The "ugly" fast launches generated 5X more recurring revenue than my "perfect" slow builds.
Why does this happen?
A few reasons:
1) Market feedback is everything. When you ship fast, you learn what customers actually want within days. When you build for 6 months, you're guessing for 6 months. Your guesses are usually wrong.
2) Momentum compounds. A live product attracts users, generates word of mouth, ranks in search, builds social proof. A product in development does none of that. Every day you're building instead of shipping is a day your competition is learning from real customers.
3) Motivation dies in long builds. I've watched my own excitement fade on projects that dragged on. By month 4, I was bored. By month 5, I was looking for reasons to pivot. The fast ships kept me energized because I was seeing real results.
4) Features you think matter usually don't. Half the features I spent months building? Users never touched them. The fast launches forced me to ship only the core value prop, and turns out that's all people needed anyway.
The hard truth: your product sitting on your computer is worth exactly $0. The same product live, even if broken, is worth infinitely more because it's generating data, users, and revenue.
Ship fast. Learn fast. Iterate fast. That's the game.
What's something you've been building too long? Maybe it's time to just launch it.