

The "Do it the Hard Way" Trap - brianr
http://brianrue.wordpress.com/2013/03/06/the-do-it-the-hard-way-trap/

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mschaecher
I don't think you'd ever hear anyone whose created something truly great say
this.

For a lot of them, good enough, just isn't. (partial Howard Schultz, CEO of
Starbucks, quote)

Sure good enough MVPs might be alright. Once you find product market fit,
build "whole product" and customer experience. Stop building new stuff, take
what you're already doing good enough and make it great.

Fab deliveries used to take 1-2+ months a year ago. Now it takes less than two
weeks, sometimes same week. Not holding inventory, inbounding post purchase
and MVP pick and pack is the easy way. Since they stopped doing things the
easy way, I know my friends and I order 2-3x as much.

At Airbnb, we were technically international from day 1. We could've kept
doing internationalization like we were doing....good enough. Instead we chose
the hard, increased our language and currency support 2-3x, and spent a
painful 2-3 months taking all consumer facing localization forward be leaps
and bounds, not steps. We pry wouldn't have doubled the previous 3 years of
nights booked in 3 months if we hadn't.

At Munchery, a lot of stuff is currently good enough because they were focused
on finding product and operational market fit.

We found fit. Now we're circling back and taking everything we're already
doing good enough, and making it freaking great.

You can check back in with me in 3 months and see if doing the hard work was
worth if you want.

But I'd bet a lot of money that it will be.

As Mark Cuban said "everyone tells you they're going to be special. But no one
does the work. Do the fucking work."*

*I added fucking to Mark's quote

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brianr
Agree with most of what you're saying. What I was trying to communicate is
that trying to win by doing things that seem more difficult than everybody
else isn't a strategy, it's a cop-out. It can feel unmatchable, but often it's
actually a waste of effort.

There absolutely are times when the work required really is hard. Your
internationalization example is a great one -- you had to do 3 months of hard
work, but the payoff was huge. And you didn't do this until the lower hanging
fruit was already done.

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gordaco
Actually, what the article calls "the easy way" is often harder than "the hard
way". "The hard way" is a lot about jumping into the obvious approach at the
first opportunity, while "the easy way" may require some heavy thinking and
discussing several alternatives, one of which still is, after all, "the hard
way" (sometimes you HAVE to reinvent the wheel).

However, "the easy way", done well, can be faster and thus will feel less
work-heavy.

I think I'd go as far as to say that I'll never be a very good engineer
because I'm always very "hard way"-prone, and it's a flaw that I don't seem to
be able to get rid of.

~~~
brianr
Indeed, maybe it would be better the "smart" or "deliberate" way.

