[4] How fast can a house be built?
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a fantastic weekend! Our piece today is inspired by conversations we’ve had recently (particularly) with people building organizations. The theme that came up a lot was: what is the right balance between healthy growth and growth at all costs?
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Now, Now, Now
Time flies.
It’s been ~2 years and counting since the pandemic started. We remember things that happened yesterday as if they happened years ago.
And things that happened years ago as if it were yesterday.
We are losing our sense of reality.
Yet, the speed at which the world wants things to be done is increasing in speed. Everything needs to get done all too soon. “Fast” used to be “in the future,” then it moved to “in the not so distant future,” then “near future,” then “tomorrow,” then “today”, and now we want everything we are going to do to have been done by “yesterday.”
This is happening in a lot of areas in our lives.
It wasn’t too long ago that we as a society were introduced to e-commerce and the magical experience of clicking a few buttons online led to the thing we wanted to show up at our doorstep within a week.
Then all the eCommerce companies fought over two day shipping and who can get you what you ordered in two days or less. Now the standard is one day shipping.
And in 2022, depending on the category, the expectation is now 15 minutes or less.
I read a funny tweet that said something to the effect of, in 2022, valuations for on-demand platforms will be decided by how many minutes they can shave off of the 15-minute mark.
WTF is happening here?
I am all for getting things quicker, especially for communities that cannot access things quickly enough. But do we really need groceries delivered in 15 minutes?
Where does it stop?
11 minutes?
10 minutes?
9 minutes?
30 seconds?
And how many of us actually need this versus want this, versus want the novelty of this (i.e. I only want it once or twice, but it’s not a routine I am going to subscribe to)?
And this focus on getting things faster isn’t isolated to groceries or on-demand delivery platforms; it’s become the general expectation of society.
Here is a simple (fun?) test: how many of you warm things up in a microwave and stop the timer with a few seconds left?
Those last few seconds feel insanely long, don’t they?
Company Building
The area of society I think about a lot is company building, especially when it comes to “too quickly”. Are we placing an immense amount of pressure on builders to build too quickly (before they even know what they want to build?)
I am NOT arguing that things should be built slowly, but the opposite of slow should not be fast at all costs without considering tradeoffs.
In a world where capital seems endless and speed to scale is the name of the game for a lot of new companies and ideas, everyone quickly pivots to focusing on scale and growth at all costs. The risk is that doing anything too quickly has inevitable trade-offs … the big one being quality.
The question is when is it “too quickly” with corners being cut and one too many shortcuts being taken? You cannot cut corners for too long before it catches up (i.e. you have to pay back tech / process / actual debt at some point with interest).
Are we all okay sacrificing quality just to say we did something quickly, or can we add a little bit of patience to avoid “rushing it” and creating problems down the line?
Like most things, there is a balance: the key is moving quickly enough with enough quality.
Everyone wants to build something to impact many users, but before you get to the many, you should start with the few. How can you worry about adding value to 1M users, when you haven’t even added value to 10 users?
The old company building adage of “do things that don’t scale in the beginning…” is about learning the craft and the nuances of your product and service. Spending time gathering feedback and talking to all of your users is not sustainable for growth, but spending time with your first 10 users will teach you a lot about your product. Once you get that right, then you should add fuel to the fire.
If you scale too prematurely, things fall apart. It ends up being a bad product or service.
So how fast can you build a house?
Well, it depends on what type of house you want to build.
If you want to build a house in 5 minutes, it can be done.
It’ll just be a house of cards. ♠️❤️♣️♦️🃏