Why we overbuild

We know the playbook and we somehow still overbuild. Lets hear from the experts on why this happens.

Author

John Hancock
May 03, 2023

Last week, I asked in a poll: “What do you and your team tend to get wrong in your startup?” with the following options:

  • Overbuilding (before user validation)

  • Overhiring (staffing up too quickly without PMF)

  • Overselling (promising features that don't exist yet)

  • Overthinking (not making decisions fast enough)

Much to my surprise, the very thing that I felt Stonks was struggling with was the RESOUNDING winner. Overbuilding took 64% of the vote. But how can this be? Stonks is a unique startup that makes unique mistakes, right??

Why do we do this?

Ok, so it’s a common enough problem. We know that we need to talk to users, and obviously, we’re all aware of Reid Hoffman’s iconic quote:
“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”.

So what is going wrong? Do we love building too much? I think this tweet from Ryan Hoover in 2018 sums up the problem nicely:

You have to admit, designing/building FEELS like progress. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t love the building part.

But is overbuilding actually dangerous?

Maybe, but maybe not for the reason you might think. PG shared his opinion in this thread from 2020 with his typical spot-on wisdom:

“It’s not the overbuilding per se that kills [startups]. It’s that they were building instead of talking to customers, and thus built the wrong thing. It’s the absence of the right features that kills, not the presence of too many.”

Paul Graham

This was exactly what I needed to hear today. From this day forward, Stonks is hell-bent on thoroughly validating ideas and ruthlessly iterating the product.

That’s it for today. Thank you for reading 🙂 

-John @ Stonks