Joseph Javier Perla

I disagree that if you try to perfect your product, you will necessarily succeed. In fact, I contend that you will necessarily fail.

Perfection is impossible. You will never achieve it. Your startup can get 90% of the way there with just a little effort. To get that last 10%, to be close enough to caress perfection, would take orders of magnitude more work. You never launch.

Take the example of designing your homepage. It is incredibly complex and dynamic, with dozens if not hundreds of individual components. Of course, it is also the most important page of your entire site. Now, consider just one tiny aspect of designing this page: where to align the text. You end up spending hours deciding how many pixels from the left side of the screen your text should start. Yes, there is a perfect distance. You can make focus groups and do scientifically-rigorous experiments, then ask a consultant to run all the data you collected through a quadratic optimizer. Or, you can ask the guy next to you if it’s ugly or not. Saves you money, save you time, and you can actually get the valuable part to the end-user.

Better yet, at regular intervals, just run through a quick usability test with someone, anybody. Sit next to them, and ask them to find some information. If she hesitates, then you found an important problem. If she finds it quickly, then congratulations! Your site is ten times better than nine out of ten sites online. If she says that the orange on your hompage should be just a little more red, then you need a different tester. Color, spacing, width, etc are not important. They are means to an end. Don’t spend time measuring and testing and perfecting the means. Spend your time excelling at the ends.

Ferrari is a great brand. But it also doesn’t make the kind of money that Google makes. They only make any amount of money because they are an old company, and because they advertise to people that they spend a lot of time “perfecting” their engines. I’d still bet Toyota engines last longer. Sure, Ferraris can accelerate faster and have a higher top speed, but a lot Ferrari owners don’t race and instead just buy the cars for their cachet.

So, I can probably create a car company overnight which would have as much or more cachet, but without the wasted effort in trying to “perfect” design. All I have to do is take a Toyota, put a slightly different frame on it (Lotus?), and perhaps stud it with diamonds and layer solid gold on everything. Instantaneous excellence. On top of everything, I’d probably also make more money than Ferrari.