I built for three months before I talked to a single customer.
In If You Can’t Lose, You Aren’t Playing I wrote about Shommi. Three months of coding before going to work. Three car dealerships. Zero buyers. The product died.
That was macro-failure. Three months of climbing stairs without ever jumping. When I finally jumped, the fall was too far.
Would the product have survived if I went to potential customers after two weeks instead of three months? Maybe not. It could have been the wrong product regardless. But I would have known sooner. And time is non-renewable.
The three months were not wasted. I learned about sentiment analysis, about working with different APIs and I learned what not to do.
A long, slow feedback loop means you are flying blind. Planes do not fly in straight lines. They auto-correct constantly. A small deviation gets caught and fixed in seconds. But if you fly for months without checking, you burn all your fuel heading in the wrong direction. Your plane falls out of the sky.
A tight feedback loop is auto-correcting. You will still drift. But you correct in days instead of months.
Thirteen years later I built HeadsUp differently. No code at first. I sent handcrafted Notion documents to founders asking what they cared about. Some ignored me. Some said they would not use something like this.
But I had not written a single line of code yet.
I needed to understand what to build. Get the idea out of my head and into someone else’s hands before investing months. A well-designed experiment is small enough to overcome your resistance and atomic enough to give you a clear signal.
Four stairs and jump. Four more and jump. Each small “no” cost me hours, not months. Each one made the next attempt better.
That’s micro-failure. And it’s how our bones work. I got that lesson from reading Antifragile. Jump off the porch and you get stronger. Keep climbing without jumping and the fall from the 10th floor is the one you do not walk away from.
You are going to fail either way. The only question is how far. Whether you get stronger or whether you do not walk away from it.
Fake games suppress volatility. Reading without publishing. Coding without shipping. Planning without selling. Each one feels productive. Each one is another floor you are climbing without jumping.
The market is gravity. You can delay it. You cannot escape it.
The safest path tends to be the most dangerous one.
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What would you learn if you shipped it this week?