usable ladder, perfect ladder

Look at the image.

The ladder on the right is your “perfect” vision. It has clean lines and sanded wood. It’s beautiful. It’s also useless. You can’t climb it. If you spend another month polishing the UI of your app or optimizing its performance without letting a single user touch it, you are building the ladder on the right. You are standing at the bottom of the wall, admiring your tools while your competitors are already on the roof.

The ladder on the left is “Ugly Action.” It’s crooked. It looks like crap. It might even give you a splinter. But it reaches the top.

The Brutal Truth is “perfect” is just a fancy word for procrastination. You are scared of being judged for a buggy MVP, so you hide behind “quality.”

The Market doesn’t care about your ego. They care about their problem being solved.

An ugly tool that works makes money. A beautiful tool that isn’t finished is a hobby that costs you money.

Refinement happens at the top. You fix the rungs of the ladder after you’ve seen over the wall.

Stop polishing the wood. Ship the ugly version of what you have, today. If nobody laughs at your first version, you launched too late.