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Launch Early, Learn Often: The Perils of Brain Crack

By In Technology

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” – Reid Hoffman

I’ve seen a ton of founders and even experienced product people in large organizations delay the release of an app, site, or whatever because it’s not perfect. Here’s the deal: Perfection is a mirage, a tantalizing but ultimately unreachable goal that can keep you trapped in a never-ending cycle of tweaks and refinements. Enter the phenomenon I like to call “Brain Crack” – not my original idea (of course), but one that came from the amazing Ze Frank and his profanity laced video of the same title.

Brain Crack: The Addiction to Perfection

Brain Crack is what happens when you see a product evolve, and with every improvement, you come up with new ideas to make it even better. It’s that addictive feeling of always having the perfect product just within reach, but never actually releasing it because it lives in your head in a future perfect state. You can live off the crack—the IDEA of perfection—without ever facing the reality of launching.

The Reality Check of Launching

When your product is barely ready for launch, it’s real. This is when the hard work starts. You’ll start comparing it to actual mature products in the market—products that have taken years and millions of dollars to get to their current state. You’ll want your brand new product to look as good and have as many features as something backed by 100 engineers and $50 million. But guess what? It won’t. And that’s okay.

The Myth of the Perfect Launch

People forget that you will almost never launch the right product. Even if it’s for an internal audience, a system will never survive its first encounter with end users unscathed. Products and systems pivot every single time. They are created by a few people with great ideas, doing the best they can with their brains. But when you have a lot more brains looking at something, they will always find things the system can do better or differently, or they’ll use it in ways you never thought about.

Embrace the Ugly Baby

You need to get your product to users as soon as possible so you can start working on the REAL product—the one you don’t know about yet because you haven’t let your ugly baby out of the house. You’ll never know that it’s not ugly or that it is actually a super-powered email replacement rather than a baby in the first place.

Conclusion

The key to building a successful product isn’t about getting it perfect before launch. It’s about getting it out there, letting users interact with it, and learning from their feedback. Your product will evolve in ways you could never predict, but only if you have the courage to release it into the wild, warts and all. So, take a deep breath, let go of the brain crack pipe, and launch that imperfect product. You’ll be embarrassed by the first version, but you’ll also be on your way to creating something truly amazing.

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I help companies turn their technical ideas into reality.

CEO @Sourcetoad and @OnDeck

Founder of Thankscrate and Data and Sons

Author of Herding Cats and Coders

Fan of judo, squash, whiskey, aggressive inline, and temperamental British sports cars.

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The Internet Doesn’t Have Enough Love In It (And How We Can Fix It Easily)

In Technology

I’ve been thinking about all the wrong things when it comes to AI writing code.

Everyone else seems to be too. Job displacement. Security vulnerabilities. The ten-times-faster developer who now bills the same and delivers four times as much. These are real conversations worth having, just not the one I want to have right now.

The one I want to have is about teaching a six-year-old multiplication.

Here’s what I mean. Imagine you’ve been sitting with your kid every night for two weeks trying to explain multiplication. You’ve tried drawing rows of dots. You’ve tried songs (don’t judge me). You’ve tried the “just think of it as groups of things” approach that works for literally every other math concept but, mysteriously, not for your kid. Then one night, something clicks. You found the explanation, YOUR explanation, the one that worked for your actual kid with your actual kid’s brain, and it finally, beautifully, clicks.

Now imagine you could spend a Saturday morning turning that into a small web app. Not a startup. Not a SaaS platform. No login. No backend. No one’s going to hack it (there’s nothing to hack). Just a little thing that walks through multiplication the exact way you figured out it works, step by step, the way you’d explain it. You send it to the WhatsApp group for your kid’s class. Some of those other parents, also quietly losing their minds over multiplication, try it. And it helps.

You just made the world a tiny bit better. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

Claude Code exists now, and a handful of other tools like it, and the reason I think this matters isn’t productivity. It’s access. The barrier between “I have an idea for something that could help people” and “I have a thing that helps people” used to require knowing how to code, or hiring someone who does, or talking a developer friend into your project over enough beers that their guilt exceeded their better judgment. Now it’s a Saturday morning and a good description of what you want to build.

The internet already has beautiful things in it that were built out of love. Free coding education for kids. Open-source video editors. Someone’s incredibly detailed home-brewing app with no monetization plan whatsoever. Artists making interactive experiences because they wanted to see if they could. These things exist because someone cared more about making the thing than making money from the thing. I think that ratio is about to shift dramatically in favor of the people who just want to make something good.

I’m not saying we should all stop paying for Salesforce (we should probably keep paying for Salesforce, there’s a reason that thing costs what it costs). I’m saying the category of software that was previously not worth building because it wasn’t commercial enough to justify the cost, that category just got a lot more interesting.

What’s in that category? Things like:

  • An app that helps beginning judo students understand the concepts behind a throw, not just the mechanics, because judo is where I learned confidence and discipline and I want other kids to find that
  • A private family memory vault (not Instagram, not Facebook, not anything with an algorithm deciding what matters), just a place where the people who love my son can send photos and stories somewhere safe, for him to open when he’s older (Maybe I’ll turn this into something?)
  • A system that reminds companies to send their employees gifts on the days that actually matter to them, because I know from running a company that it fills the cup of the person giving just as much as the person receiving (Thankscrate, if you’re curious, and yes, that one is turning into something real, but that is genuinely not why I built it)

None of those were commercial ideas first. They were just things I cared about.

I think the most interesting software that gets built in the next few years won’t come from developers moving faster. It’ll come from people who previously had no path from “I care about this” to “I built something about this,” and now they do. Parents. Coaches. Teachers. The person in your office who could explain that one complicated process better than anyone and has always secretly wanted to turn it into something.

The stakes are low. The bar to launch is low. The cost is low. The only thing required is that you actually give a damn about what you’re building.

So… What do you give a damn about?

Go build it. I still sometimes have to count on my fingers, but I’m told the app helps.