The "Do it the Hard Way" Trap | Hacker News Reader

The "Do it the Hard Way" Trap

brianrue.wordpress.com

6 pointsbrianr4 comments

I don't think you'd ever hear anyone whose created something truly great say this.

For a lot of them, good enough, just isn't. (partial Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, quote)

Sure good enough MVPs might be alright. Once you find product market fit, build "whole product" and customer experience. Stop building new stuff, take what you're already doing good enough and make it great.

Fab deliveries used to take 1-2+ months a year ago. Now it takes less than two weeks, sometimes same week. Not holding inventory, inbounding post purchase and MVP pick and pack is the easy way. Since they stopped doing things the easy way, I know my friends and I order 2-3x as much.

At Airbnb, we were technically international from day 1. We could've kept doing internationalization like we were doing....good enough. Instead we chose the hard, increased our language and currency support 2-3x, and spent a painful 2-3 months taking all consumer facing localization forward be leaps and bounds, not steps. We pry wouldn't have doubled the previous 3 years of nights booked in 3 months if we hadn't.

At Munchery, a lot of stuff is currently good enough because they were focused on finding product and operational market fit.

We found fit. Now we're circling back and taking everything we're already doing good enough, and making it freaking great.

You can check back in with me in 3 months and see if doing the hard work was worth if you want.

But I'd bet a lot of money that it will be.

As Mark Cuban said "everyone tells you they're going to be special. But no one does the work. Do the fucking work."*

*I added fucking to Mark's quote

Agree with most of what you're saying. What I was trying to communicate is that trying to win by doing things that seem more difficult than everybody else isn't a strategy, it's a cop-out. It can feel unmatchable, but often it's actually a waste of effort.

There absolutely are times when the work required really is hard. Your internationalization example is a great one -- you had to do 3 months of hard work, but the payoff was huge. And you didn't do this until the lower hanging fruit was already done.

Actually, what the article calls "the easy way" is often harder than "the hard way". "The hard way" is a lot about jumping into the obvious approach at the first opportunity, while "the easy way" may require some heavy thinking and discussing several alternatives, one of which still is, after all, "the hard way" (sometimes you HAVE to reinvent the wheel).

However, "the easy way", done well, can be faster and thus will feel less work-heavy.

I think I'd go as far as to say that I'll never be a very good engineer because I'm always very "hard way"-prone, and it's a flaw that I don't seem to be able to get rid of.

Indeed, maybe it would be better the "smart" or "deliberate" way.

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