Doing things fast has more primary and second-order benefits than we realize which makes it hard to conceptualize its full value. As a simple example, consider how we evaluate products by how completely they solve the problem. If you remove the temporal component, the value of the solution drops to zero—a solution is useless if it’s not available in a sensible amount of time.
Now factor in the value of exceeding your expectation for a sensible amount of time. Then factor in the likelihood of doing it again because it’s fast. Then repurpose the time saved towards working on something else that is valuable.
Links to this note
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If you don’t answer a message in a timely manner, the other person has to assume either you haven’t received it or you chose not to respond. If they believe you haven’t received it, their only recourse is to message you again. If they believe you chose not to respond, they might have some feels about it.
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Productivity Is Bounded by Decision Making
At a certain point, optimizing productivity becomes optimizing for speed of decision making. After all the tools, shortcuts, and hacks, that build up raw speed to get tasks done, you’re left with the cognitive load of decision making. That email you received? It’s a decision disguised as a reply. That Slack message that remains unread? You’re procrastinating because a decision needs to be made that you don’t want to confront.
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A lab notebook is where research scientists keep track of their experiments so that they can be reproduced and verified. Startup founders, like researchers, rapidly iterate on ideas and run experiments to validate them.
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Faster is more productive because it is a multiplier on tasks you spend a lot of time doing (thinking, writing, typing, debugging).
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Moving Quickly Lowers Activation Energy
Speed matters because it lowers the activation energy needed to start a task. If tasks feel quick, the perceived cost of doing it is lower and you are more likely to do it. Conversely, if tasks feel like a slog, you are much less likely to do it because the perceived cost will feel higher.
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§ How to Make Your First Sales Before Launching
Answering the question, how do you do early sales when you are pre-product?
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As much as I love my emacs setup, I can’t take my laptop with me everywhere and that is my biggest compliant. For me investing in personal infrastructure makes sense as I build more one of one software that improves my life. More specifically, there are ways of searching for information I’ve built up over the years that I’ve come to rely on. To be able to search for information consistently across devices, there needs to be a personal indexing service.
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There is a noticeable difference between the speed of the most productive software engineers I’ve worked with and the slowest. What do they do that others don’t? Is it possible to learn how to be faster?
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Shipping and Hiring Velocity Are Predictors of Successful Pre-Product Companies
In the early days of a pre-product startup there is little to measure. There’s no sales, there’s no product KPIs, no press releases, and so on.
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Value Goes to Zero as Time Approaches Infinity
The longer something takes to deliver value, the less valuable it is. For example, when building a feature for a product, if it takes a year to build, it’s going to be less valuable than if it were to take a month because of the opportunity cost.
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I read Speed x AI from Nfx. It says that founders need to move much faster or those leveraging generative AI will leave you in the dust.
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Initial Stack for the Noteland Web App
My initial values and principles for developing Noteland helps to narrow down some guidelines for choosing a stack for the web app: