Buying version one

When a corner shop in Shubra first started taking orders by phone message, it was not a good service. Orders came wrong. The delivery boy went to the wrong floor. The total in the message did not match the total at the till. A sensible customer would have waited until it worked.

Some people did not wait. They sent their lists anyway, put up with the mistakes, and told the shop what had gone wrong. Because of them the shop got better at it, and a year later the sensible customers arrived at a service that worked and assumed it always had.

That is how nearly everything new goes. Nothing people rely on today began finished. The people with money, the people with influence and the cautious buyers tend to say the same thing to anything new: show us when it cannot fail, and we will happily join. It is a reasonable position, and it guarantees they will be last.

The jump forward does not come from them. It comes from releasing a thing while it is still rough, and from finding the small group of people who would rather have it rough now than polished later. They exist in every market. They are not doing the maker a favour. They want the new thing badly enough to forgive it.

Waiting for perfect before launching usually means waiting for a crowd that will only arrive after someone else has gone first. The work is to find the people who go first, and to give them something worth going with.