I think it’s generally true that product shipping speed is very important for startups. You’ll always have competition, having the best product is crucial to “winning”, that means you have to be faster than your competitors.<p>However, speed has to be balanced against things like:<p>- Doing customer research/building the right things<p>- Stability (high uptime, few bugs)<p>- “Workflow regressions” (not explicit bugs, implementing a change correctly, but not realizing it breaks a key workflow for key customers)<p>For a B2C social network, speed dominates those factors. Ship a lot, keep the successful features and prune others, customers tolerate the rapid change and a moderate level of
bugs and outages.<p>However, for a B2B Enterprise startup, where your software is absolutely mission critical for your customers, and you MUST have a great reputation to do more sales, it’s distant. Those other items are really important too, and you do have to sacrifice some speed for them.<p>Even for mission critical Enterprise startups, I think you still have to emphasize speed a lot to “win”, but it can’t dominate things like stability, customer research and workflow regressions. You have to sacrifice a moderate amount of speed for those things.