Good v/s Awesome
19 Sep 2024 · Ravdeep Singh
Craft is hard.
Hard because creating a table from wood requires design, planning, and execution to click. It is either the most gifted or lucky who've figured out all this to manufacture 7,890 tables before ever having put one in a showroom knowing that they can sell precisely that number.
I'm neither all that gifted, nor that lucky.
Fortunately, I've picked technology as a career choice where I can tilt both in my favour, slightly. Shipping something every week which is sometimes imperfect allows me to get real feedback around what might work vs not. Wafrow has ~12 trial customers in 5 weeks of firm inception allowing me to gauge two things:
- What I'm building has value
- What I'm building has issues
Value == people are willing to give it a shot.
Issues == people complain things are not working
Honestly, I take the complaints as a compliment... The phrase, "the opposite of love is not hate, it's apathy" is fitting here.
Tilting the design and planning process to fix issues and focusing on what is generating value every week will someday make the 12 trial customers 12,000. Let’s hope. What I’m unwilling to do is to wait and ship the most polished thing I possibly can so that 12,000 people rush to buy it. I don’t know how to.
P.s. inspired from real customer feedback complaining: “this didn’t feel natural at all man… fix this.”