Sometimes the best solution is to stop trying to perfect it

A few days ago, I posted about how easy it is to get carried away building things, especially with AI making implementation so accessible.

It reminded me of something I went through with Atlas, my travel app project.

I spent quite some time trying to improve place search, exploring different search engines and data providers. But eventually I realized that getting anywhere close to perfect search would take a lot of effort and potentially be quite costly. Hard to justify when you don't even have users yet 😅

So I took a simpler approach: let users click anywhere on the map and add a place themselves.

I wrote a bit more about it here: https://buildingatlas.substack.com/p/the-places-atlas-doesnt-know

Have you ever spent too much time perfecting something before realizing there was a simpler way around it?