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
How do you decide when to stop shipping and start listening?
what signal tell you that speed is hurting more than helping?
How do you balance user feedback with your original vision?
How do you avoid overreacting to a small sample of feedback?
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.
How do you keep a team aligned when slowing down feels risky?
Murror
@george_esther I totally get you, and I think you actually said it better than I did. It really was about changing the loop, not slowing down. We were moving fast in the wrong direction. Once we swapped out assumptions for real conversations, the speed actually increased because we stopped wasting cycles on things nobody needed. So yes, you are right. It was never about going slower. It was about pointing the speed at the right things.
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.