rgw@icdattcwsm:~/Blog$ cat 2024-09-26-Dont-Just-Build-Chisel.md

Reputations aren't built. They are chiseled. And any craftsman knows, that chiseling is more about subtracting, than adding.

One of my favorite quips is that the customer is great at telling you what to add, but horrible, at telling you what to delete.

Steve Jobs is often misquoted to argue that we should ignore what the customer says, and focus on what the customer doesn't know he needs. An argument, incorrectly positioned as a means to discover new markets, and find product-market fit.

Product-market fit, is MORE an INTERSECTION, and LESS an OVERLAP. The idea has always been to double down on that INTERSECTION, rather than widen the OVERLAP. What Steve Jobs said, was never meant to be some clever, argumentative scheme. Reacting to anything and everything the customer says, by releasing a new build, would accumulate tech debt, and make the startup, in the long run, more and more labor-driven, vs. code-driven.

Labor-driven ventures DO scale. Slowly. Painfully. But, they can indeed be scalable, though, never as scalable, as tech-driven ventures.

So, if the objective is to build a 1000x scalable venture, the real question is NOT what to build, but what to chisel.

rgw@icdattcwsm:~/Blog$ cd ..