Imagine you’re building a base to neutralise the zombies. Outside the gates, there are hordes of zombies that may be attracted to your camp but they are unaware of your existence. You’re focusing on fortifying your camp and it is shaping up nicely into a strong foothold, but half way through you say “okay I think the camp defences are looking good enough, lets bring in the zombies to have some fun and if our defences lack we’ll build them up along the way.”.

So you open the gates prematurely. To your surprise, the zombies did not care?! They don’t know your camp even exists. All the zombies are attracted to a different more bigger and louder camps where all the rest of the zombies are charging.

Although, a few of them who were wandering in the nearby woods did charge you. One lone Zombie at a time they start to look at what you have to offer. The fight begins. You start hacking and slashing to kill them but to your surprise it's taking a lot of effort to help the poor bastards die.

The zombies aren't dying because guess what? Your guns are jammed now and your walls? Yeah, they aren't as strong enough as they are suppose to be. It's not working out as you expected.

You start wondering what would have happened if hundreds of thousands of Zombies flooded your gates like you expected and wished? You surely wouldn’t have survived. You’d be dead before the sunrise. It would have been hard to even think what to do.

segue

This is the kind of mistake a lot of startups founders make too. If you think about it, when a founder has a product that is halfway done they desperately open the gates for people to signup for their product. They invite everyone who would like to try it. And, it doesn't workout in their favour because the product wasn't ready yet and their potential customers end up being frustrated.

In this pressure of not delivering impacts their performance. They start making a hasty decision they wouldn’t normally make. And the end product end up far away from what they envision because with more users to serve it gets harder to focus on actually building and innovating.

As a startup founder, there is an uncanny desire to show your half baked product to the world. The bottom line is, it should be avoided. Instead you should focus only on "building" until there is something strong and worthy to launch. Just like, Steve Jobs did with... well almost every product he launched, like the iPod... whoof nobody had a clue of what it was going to be, until we all saw it.

Lessons to learn my friend, that's all I am saying.