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politician

You’ll feel better about making “worse” decisions if you shift your thinking towards now/next/later.

_Now_, we choose off-the-shelf X because it will get us started and we have 99 other things to bootstrap.

_Next_, we throw the original away and plug in better tech Y.

_Later_, when resources are not an issue, we’ll use Kubern... tech Z. :)

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If I've learned anything from launching a product thats getting some real traction, there is no _Later_, and _Next_ keeps slipping further into the future. It's okay to move a little bit slower and make sure you get decisions right since you'll likely never come back to what you're working on now, and if you do it'll be years later. This doesn't mean that you should sit there and built everything out today as if you're Googlescale, but don't be afraid to move a little bit slower and consider some more options including rolling your own if it makes sense.

Maybe the product you launched wouldn't have gained traction if you delivered a bit slower or lacked a few of the features? The strategy you used worked, why do people so often say "I got successful doing this, but don't do what I did do this other thing instead!"?

That's an interesting point. In our case, I'd say that slower would have been fine because we already moved slowly trying to figure out the features that would really get people to start buying, at which point things took off. Given that we're not really pushing new technology and primarly competing on price and simplicity, it doesn't seem like speed to market was a determining factor for us, while having spent some time earlier thinking longer about some fundamental issues could have avoided some serious pain I am experiencing now.

> there is no _Later_, and _Next_ keeps slipping further into the future

"Later" can turn out to be functionally equivalent to "No" and still be as valuable as "No" can be.

Moving carefully can be valuable too, of course.

If you’re on the business/product side, I hear you; it’s often “never” and forgotten about as soon as the meeting ends. If you’re technically-minded like the OP, then it can help structure and focus your analysis paralysis.

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