Crawl, Walk, Run
I am a fan of the slow and steady approach to building a business. I call it “crawl, walk, run.”
I have seen many founders try the “run right away” approach and it is super hard to make that work.
An example of “run right away” would be to raise a $30mm seed round, hire a couple of hundred employees, and go for broke. That mostly results in being broke.
Of course, there are examples of founders who did that and succeeded. But they would be the exceptions that prove the rule.
Crawl, walk, run generally means start small, do one thing really well, then get a little bigger, do a few things really well, then get a little bigger and do a few more things really well.
Crawl, walk, run is more resilient. It allows for mistakes that aren’t fatal. It takes a bit longer to get to the finish line this way, but the probability of success is way higher with crawl, walk, run.
Crawl, walk, run is a mantra for doing a startup and I recommend it to everyone.