Building It: Live With Your Users

Getting to a loved product means an extremely tight feedback loop. Ship something small, put it in front of users, watch them use it, ask what they'd pay for and what would make them recommend it, then ship again. The cycle should run in days, not quarters.

This is where 'do things that don't scale' lives inside the playbook: recruit your first users by hand, one at a time, and treat them absurdly well. Founders who wait for users to show up usually wait forever.

Keep the product simple. Simplicity forces you to do one thing extremely well, and one thing done extremely well is what earns the first hundred fanatics. Complexity at this stage is a way of hiding from the question of whether anyone loves the core.