When building startups, a naturally occurring theme is constraints.
What are the constraints we have as a team? What are our technical constraints? What about financial contraints? Do we have geographical contraints? What about legal contraints?
Constraints are often discussed in terms of limitations, as in they prevent you from doing something you wish you could. Whether a startup, a job, or life in general, everyone deals with constraints. But it's rare we talk about them in terms of their benefits.
Sure, constraints prevent us from doing things, but they also force us to find innovative solutions.
I recently participated in an AI hackathon during LA tech week where we had only 24 hours to build something. A good friend and I got together and landed on something we were calling Thumbprint.
The idea was that if you could pass a sample of your digital footprint to an LLM, you could generate a unique enough fingerprint to use for things like ad targeting. We called them LLM-generated psychographic cookies because they were objects that linked you to various data points inferred from your digital footprint that could be associated with other relevant points on a graph.
Hence the name Thumbprint, which is also a really delicious kind of cookie.
Anyway. We knew that because we had 24 hours, we could only build so much of it out. We threw together a sleak web app that allowed you to generate these cookies. To our surprise, it was enough for people to understand the idea pretty easily.
When you have all the time in the world, it's easy to let perfectionism take hold. You'll convince yourself of things like "the product will only seem investable when we have x feature working."
The truth is that this kind of thinking is self-deluding and ultimately self-sabotaging. On the path from idea to company, products continuously evolve. Often times to a point unrecognizable from the original. But it's easy to convince yourself otherwise.
The truth is you only need to build the simplest working version of something that conveys an idea. And if you could only convey the idea, you would have succeeded, because you're now empowered to share your idea with the world in a way that can only be done by building it.
You don't need months of building. Often, you don't need weeks. In our case, we needed 24 hours.
Peter Levels is notorios for giving himself 30 days to build something before he commits to it. I think the ability to set deadlines and commit to them is a superpower.
As someone who has personally lost months of time to projects that didn't pan out, I am beginning to see constraints as a luxury.