The biggest lie in product building: "ship fast, learn later"
Everyone tells you to ship fast. Move fast and break things. Get to market before someone else does.
I believed this for a long time. When we were building Murror, speed was everything. We pushed features weekly, sometimes daily. We celebrated every deploy like a small victory.
But here is what nobody warned me about: shipping fast without learning is just organized chaos.
We shipped a mood journaling feature in three days. It looked great in our demo. Users opened it once and never came back. We shipped a reflection prompt system the next week. Same story. Fast, polished, forgotten.
The turning point came when we slowed down and actually sat with five users for an hour each. Not surveys. Not analytics dashboards. Real conversations where we just listened.
What we learned in those five hours changed everything:
Users did not want more features. They wanted fewer features that actually understood them.
2. The language we used in our prompts felt clinical. People wanted warmth, not precision.
3. Our onboarding assumed people knew what emotional reflection was. Most did not.
We spent the next month rebuilding almost nothing in terms of code. Instead, we rewrote every piece of copy. We changed the tone from "track your emotions" to "how are you actually doing today?" We removed two features entirely and made the remaining ones feel more human.
The result? Our activation rate doubled. Not because we shipped faster, but because we finally shipped something that resonated.
Speed matters, but only after you understand what to build. Otherwise you are just running in circles very efficiently.
What has been your experience? Have you ever slowed down and found that it actually accelerated your progress?
Replies
I agree with both the post and @nayan_surya's point, but I think the real trap is somewhere in between.
"Ship fast" is absolutely right when it means build the smallest thing that lets you validate whether anyone cares. The problem is that the enemy of an MVP is the founder's obsession with delivering perfection. I know because I've been that founder. I spent years building ITM Platform, a full-blown project portfolio management tool. Enterprise features, edge cases, the works.
And then once clients arrived, we fell into the second trap: treating anecdotes as the source of truth. One loud client asks for a feature, and suddenly it's on the roadmap, as if one request equals market demand.
Now I'm building something completely different, Olkano, a daily check-in app for people living alone. One tap. That's it. The entire product is smaller than a single module of what I used to build. And the discipline to keep it that small is harder than building something big ever was.
So I'd reframe it: ship fast doesn't mean ship garbage, and it doesn't mean slow down either. It means ship the smallest thing that can teach you something and then have the discipline to listen to patterns, not anecdotes. The latter still is the hardest, for me.
Murror
This really resonates, Daniel. Your point about treating anecdotes as the source of truth is something we fell into hard at Murror too. One power user would request something and we would immediately start building it, thinking we were being responsive. But responsive to one person is not the same as responsive to your users.
And I love your reframe about shipping the smallest thing that can teach you something. That is exactly where we landed. The hard part is not building small. It is staying small when every instinct tells you to add more. How are you navigating that discipline with Olkano?
@nayan_surya @daniel_piret
Daniel, why not just take a prototype out and ask people, instead of build and ship? The goal is to understand if the value meets the need. And sometimes to understand the core need. Following features and what users ask is a pitfall in my view.
This advice is highly misunderstood, the point in shipping fast is ship a mvp instead waiting to ship a perfect product reason being lot of indie developers get stuck in the loop of adding feature, finding new bugs and fixing them. But that does not mean ship garbage.
Murror
@nayan_surya98 You are right that the advice itself is not bad. The problem is how most people interpret it. Ship fast gets heard as just keep pushing things out, when the real intent is ship something small enough to learn from quickly. We were shipping fast but not learning fast, and that is the trap I wanted to highlight. The MVP loop only works if you actually close the loop with real feedback.
Murror
@jonathanfors That intentionality is everything. Cutting features takes more courage than adding them. It is so easy to justify one more thing, but every feature you add is a promise you have to maintain. Sounds like you found the same thing we did at Murror: users do not want everything, they want the right thing done well. How did your team decide what to cut from Chik?
The lie isn’t “ship fast.”
The lie is assuming every fast loop teaches.
Some loops generate output.
Very few generate understanding.
If the learning layer is weak, speed feels like progress while quietly compounding misdiagnosis.
Murror
@heritagelab This is such a precise way to put it. The distinction between loops that generate output and loops that generate understanding is exactly what we missed for months at Murror. We were shipping constantly, celebrating velocity, and it felt like progress. But we were just generating output. The understanding only came when we changed what we were actually measuring in each loop. Really well said.
The distinction that's missing from this conversation: there are two types of learning, and "ship fast" only reliably generates one of them.
Analytics tell you what users did. Conversations tell you what users meant. The first is cheap and fast. The second is slow and uncomfortable. Almost every team defaults to the first because it feels like learning without requiring you to sit with someone who doesn't love what you built.
Mona's experience is a good illustration. The analytics said "opens once, never returns." That's a signal, not an explanation. The explanation required five hours of real conversation.
The reframe isn't "slow down." It's: choose the right learning instrument for the question you're actually trying to answer. Shipping fast to generate behavioral data makes sense. Shipping fast to avoid talking to users just creates a faster feedback loop on the wrong signal.
Murror
@ivaylotz This is probably the sharpest take in this entire thread. The two types of learning distinction is something I wish I had understood earlier. We were drowning in analytics at Murror. Open rates, session durations, feature adoption charts. All of it told us what happened but none of it told us why. And you are right, analytics feel like learning because they are fast and clean. Sitting with a user who tells you they felt confused by something you thought was obvious is slow and painful, but that is where the real insights live. Thank you for framing it so clearly.
idk i think the advice itself is fine, people just skip the "learn" part. you shipped features weekly and learned nothing from it - thats not a speed problem thats a feedback problem. the 5 user interviews you did IS shipping fast, you just finally closed the loop
Murror
@umairnadeem You make a fair point and I actually agree with you. The advice itself is solid. The problem was on our end, not with the framework. We were doing the shipping part but skipping the learning part entirely. The user interviews were not a separate thing from shipping fast, they were the missing half of the loop we should have been running all along. So yes, it was always a feedback problem, and that is exactly what I was trying to call out. Appreciate the pushback.
Speed wins, but only after listening and thinking, build quickly once you know what matters.
Hello Aria
This really resonates. We went through the exact same phase building Hello Aria — shipping fast, celebrating deploys, treating velocity as the metric. The real turning point came when we slowed down and did user interviews. Turns out people didn't want more features, they wanted the ones we had to feel more reliable and personal. Since shifting to that mindset, retention has improved significantly. "Ship fast" is seductive because it feels productive. But it's often just organized chaos dressed up as momentum. What actually worked for us was slowing down on features and speeding up on listening.This hits. The "move fast" mantra gets misapplied so often — it was meant for startups that hadn't found PMF yet, not a license to ship without intent at every stage.
The reframe I've found useful: speed is about iteration cycles, not deployment frequency. You can ship slowly but learn fast if you're deliberate about what you're testing.
Building Hello Aria (our AI productivity assistant for WhatsApp/Telegram/iOS, launching April 10th on PH) we learned this the hard way. We shipped features weekly early on because we confused activity with progress. The shift happened when we started treating every deploy as a question: "what are we learning from this?" Not "what are we building next?"
The builders who are actually fast aren't the ones deploying most — they're the ones who invalidate wrong assumptions fastest. Those aren't always the same thing.
Murror
@sai_tharun_kakirala It sounds like you and I went through nearly identical journeys. Confusing activity with progress is such a perfect way to describe it. We were doing the same thing at Murror, celebrating deploys like wins when we had no idea if anyone actually wanted what we shipped. Your reframe about iteration cycles vs deployment frequency is spot on. Good luck with Hello Aria's launch on the 10th, it sounds like you have learned the right lessons early which is a huge advantage.
Yes. A while back, I tried the "move fast, iterate a lot, learn later" method with a video game (this was 2012 and even then it didn't work, either). We wanted to soft launch and the bugs were crazy. Characters loaded upside down; they fired on their teammates...the lesson was, we launched this crud to the public, hoping it would provide feedback when we forgot that we had our own feedback initially, and thus, it sunk. No one came back when we relaunched.
Lesson learned: don't rush a process that doesn't need to be rushed.
Murror
@ryanwmcc That video game story is a great example of something a lot of us learn the hard way. The part that stands out to me is that you skipped your own feedback before asking for anyone else's. We did something similar at Murror, we were so focused on getting it out the door that we stopped being our own users. When you are too close to the deadline, you stop seeing the bugs that are obvious to everyone else. And you are right, once people leave, getting them back is nearly impossible. The relaunch never gets the same shot. Thank you for sharing that, it is a good reminder that the first impression really does matter more than we think.
The restaurant I ran before getting into tech taught me this exact lesson, just from a different angle. You can't "ship fast" when someone is sitting at your table waiting for their food. You learn by watching their face, not by checking a dashboard after they leave. That same instinct carried over when I started building in HR tech: the most useful insights always came from sitting with recruiters and watching where they got stuck, not from shipping features and hoping the data would explain things later.
Murror
@ceciliatran I love this analogy. Watching someone's face while they eat tells you everything a review card never will. We had the exact same realization at Murror. Our analytics showed us usage patterns but sitting with users and watching their faces as they interacted with the app told us what actually mattered to them. The restaurant experience is such a perfect parallel because in both cases the real feedback is in the moment, not in the data you collect after. What made you decide to make that jump from restaurants to HR tech?