On Perfection With Haste

2026.08.02

CLXIII

[Perfectionism With Haste; History Exams and Poetry; Every Single Sunday; What Writing taught me about B2B SaaS; Finding the Right Constraints; Faster Horses]

Thesis: Perfectionism without constraints becomes procrastination and is counter productive.

[Perfectionism With Haste]

For the past 3 or 4 months, I have been obsessing about WhiteWhale's product with a level of focus and attention to detail that I haven’t before.

Part of this is perhaps because we altered the structure of our business at the start of March to let me focus more on product and Jack more on sales and marketing. Not an absolute separation of concerns, but one that has been quite helpful.

The perfectionist in me has once again come out a lot more as I'm prioritizing the product and customer experience above all else.

Still, it can’t all be perfectionism, or you’d never ship anything. You have to move, and constraints help you do that. There's this strange duality that exists between two conflicting ideas:

• Perfection: everything should be of the upmost quality possible. Inspiration: Good enough never is.*

• Haste: Waiting til something is perfect to share it with the world is massively dangerous. Inspiration: Hesitation always gets you killed.**

In reality, you have to mix an attitude of perfectionism and haste together. Otherwise, your perfectionism can become procrastination. Maybe something more practical is:

• Perfection With Haste: Deliver the best possible product given constraints. Haste, because time if often the constraint.

_{*My father repeats this one a lot; not sure the absolute source but some people think it’s Debbi Fields}

_{**Didn’t cite - J Cole saying this in Sunset is why I’m thinking of this but it’s too generic for me to credit him with it.}

[History Exams and Poetry]

Innately, I'm a perfectionist.

In 7th grade, my history teacher had to have an intervention with me.

Our exams were answered with freeform text, but had to be complete thoughts and sentences. One word answers wouldn't suffice.

Brevity wasn't my problem, though; I went the other way, scrawling text all over the page in the smallest of scripts, literally wrapping it in the margins sideways to fit more. I didn't want to miss a single piece of context. Turns out, my teacher didn't want to read all of that. So, she sat me down and told me my answers could be far more brief and I’d be fine.

Later, when I was 18, I fancied myself a poet and became one; my perfectionism and obsession came out in full force.

Coming up on high school graduation, the spring and summer left me as an obsessive, somewhat neurotic and certainly restless person with no objective function: no homework, no essays, no projects, etc.

Now, don't get me wrong, I was living life and keeping busy: I ended up with my first girlfriend then, had a part time job, worked out, was going to quite a few parties, and was trading, too.

Still, my mind seems to require some big, challenging problem to grapple with at all times. Somewhere in there, I spontaneously decided I'd publish a poetry book.

I began obsessing about it. I would jot down thoughts and ideas while at a stop light driving. I kept a note pad by my bed and would wake up to note something down the minute I had something.

I'd order the poems, re order them, play with syntax, capitalization. I paid a friend to make a cover for me. Ordered a copy, held it in my hands and edited it inline.

I even had planned out a whole trilogy; I published the second instance, but never completed the third.

I wish I knew how much time I actually spent on it, but it was undoubtedly hundreds of hours.

At some point, I launched it. I need to re read it, but I do think it was quite good, and polished, even if amazingly vulgar (I was, and am, a Bukowski fanboy). Some of what I was going for was too subtle for anyone but a handful of people to see, which means it was too subtle, but I don't look back and think of it as low quality.

Interestingly, when I published it, I thought people would just buy because of the quality; this could not be further from the truth. The 80 or so copies I sold in the first 3 months were largely via hustle in the dorms and at parties.

The point is that the obsession was there, but from a commercial perspective, the results weren’t.

In other words, perfectionism is not enough. If I wanted the book to be read by more people, another round of edits likely would have had no more effect than the last one did.

[Every Single Sunday]

The perfectionism of my earlier days sometimes created good work, but I think this blog is a much better example of mixing perfectionism with haste.

Every Sunday morning, I wake up, and start writing.

For 3 or 4 hours, I'll guzzle coffee and write until it is done. I allow for very limited distractions and no phone usage, although I will admit that occasionally the conversation at the table next to mine in the coffee shop piques my attention.

I'll perhaps take one or two breaks, sometimes more. One time recently, I realized that I had sat down for 3 hours without standing up until it was done. Incidentally, this means I failed to drink enough water.

For those 3 or 4 hours, I am obsessed about and laser focused on the blog: writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, re ordering, tweaking. It's a non stop flurry of action and reflection.

At some point, though, it's done, and I publish it.

If I re read it later, I'll cringe at typos or the occasional (or frequent) run on sentence. And oh, how do I abhor unflagged inconsistencies.

In the 3 or 4 hours I'm going at it, I'm locked in, chasing perfection. Then, when it’s done, it’s done.

If I really wanted 'perfection', or at the least, something closer to the best possible output I could create on a given subject in a given number of words, I'm sure it would take 2 or 3 or maybe even 4 or 5 times as long as this does.

But, that's not what I'm after - I want the best possible output given the constraint of 3 or 4 or sometimes 5 hours of input.

Perfection within constraints; perfection with haste.

[What Writing taught me about B2B SaaS]

Over the last maybe 3 or 4 months now, I have been absolutely obsessing about WhiteWhale's product.

It blows my mind the sheer magnitude of things that can impede someone's enjoyment and pleasure when using a software product. Small things, like if you put inputs into some pop up menu, then click off without saving, they'll be confused as to why the thing didn't save.

A defensive person might say, well, that’s their fault, they should push the save button. If you’re building software for a lot of people to use, though, you kind of have to assume that if it’s not insanely obvious, some percentage of your users will always mess up on it.

Which is easy enough to solve for; depending on the inputs, maybe you either auto save the inputs or show a warning when they click off saying it won't save unless they click a button.

But, not solving it adds up... it will give the impression of immaturity and/or bugginess, and users really can have a death by a thousand small cuts!

Then, there are the bigger things, too: how long does it take the user to get their first bit of value? How much effort do they have to put in to KEEP getting value? If it's working in the background, are you explicitly communicating what it's doing so they can perceive the value more easily?

These things, like the small thing above, are all solvable, but they take time, and are often the product of many smaller changes to get there.

As an example, if that above pop up menu is a prerequisite to getting value, then having them be able to click off without inputs saving can actually be a very big problem indeed! And, if there are a lot of steps to get value, then their could be a number of similar problems hidden along the way.

That said, if those inputs are needed to get value, why are they needed? Can you make some of them default to settings good enough for 80% of users? Can you set defaults based on other inputs the user already gave you? Best, can you delete it altogether?

With so many different possible paths to take and no realistic way to have the time to explore all of them, I actually think there are probably a few quite different 'perfect' versions of any product, perfect in their own right and under certain constraints.

The issue is, if WhiteWhale would've been hidden in stealth for the last 2 years and only had 3 customers until it was 'perfect', no matter how 'perfect' we tried to make it, we'd just be scrawling endlessly in the margin of the exam to answer some question that maybe actually didn't matter at all!

What if those 3 customers weren't actually like any future ones? What if they each had some organizational flaw that we spent time building into the product?

Any notion of perfection changes with the constraints you put on the product, and the constraints change based on how you change the business and who you target and who you won't even let buy the product.

[Finding the Right Constraints]

The business you’re building around the product necessitates some of the constraints. I do think product is subservient to the business’s ability to grow and sustain itself.

If it weren't, then we'd all build in vacuums forever until our perfect little toy was done. And since you couldn't see users using it, it probably wouldn't be so useful!

You need a product that supports a growing business (assuming you want to build a business that grows, which most people do!). Perhaps at some point it's sufficient to optimize the product for cash flow and let the business sustain itself in perpetuity, but I'm not there yet, so that's not what I'm writing about.

And since the amount of time you have to build is always limited, time is always a constraint. Hence haste.

Perhaps the best question is, will obsessing about this product or feature or bug or issue let me grow the business more? By the way, as anyone who has hit a churn wall will tell you, not losing customers is part of growing a business...

Remember, you're building leverage.

[Faster Horses]

I also believe you need to have the Steve Jobs hubris, the approach of saying the customer doesn't know what they want.

We return to that oft repeated Henry Ford phrase:

I love my customers, and wouldn't be here without them. But really, they don't always know what they want, let alone need. Perhaps it sounds arrogant to you, but it’s Jack & I’s job to understand what our customers actually need and give it to them in the simplest possible way.

That’s the trade being made; you give us money, we solve your problems, sometimes even ones you don’t know you have!

When someone has a problem, sometimes they might communicate a problem one or two layers up from the root issue. 'This part of the ui is confusing' could mean that part of the ui is confusing, or it could mean the fact that the page exists entirely is confusing. Those are two very different things with very different solutions!

So, I think it's actually necessary to have some of the swagger of seeing through customer requests to the underlying issues. This is how you build what actually matters, not what looks like it might.

This is where you direct your obsessive, perfectionist energies.

I’m here every week talking about SaaS & writing & philosophy & the West & all that fun stuff. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe for more.

[Empathy]

Perfection is necessary, but not sufficient, to build something that gives value to people.

It is possible to pour obsessive effort and energy ceaselessly into one thing without anybody consuming it, but that's a hobby, or an art, if you want. More perfectionism with my poetry book would not have necessarily made more people read it.

Perhaps that’s how starving artists are born.

Either way, perfection is not all that is needed to start a business.

There are endless things you can change, but you are trying to grow, you need to keep focusing your obsessive energy and efforts on the highest leverage one. Right now for WhiteWhale, that means an absolute obsession with product… guided by constantly asking what will give more value to the customer and make them stay longer?

As I've said before, a really great product truly is a moat.

Live Deeply,