Stop fixing bugs. Go get customers.

If that sounds or feels reckless, then this is for you.

Had a conversation about something I think a lot of you are quietly wrestling with as founders: should you keep testing and fixing things, or should you shift focus to getting more users?

And it speaks to something bigger. A lot of founders I see have the same challenge. They’re so deep in the product that they never actually build a go-to-market strategy. You’ve got this thing you built, you poured months (maybe years) into it, and nobody’s using it. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, you know the rest.

I had this same challenge with AfterSchool HQ. Had a lot of product built, but not a lot of customers on the platform. Of course you have to have something for people to use, but you have to know where to stop building and when to start selling. And most of us (especially the builders) default to “let me add one more feature” instead of “let me go find one more customer.”

The fear of imperfection

I get the instinct. You want everything to be perfect before anyone sees it. You don’t want that new customer to hit the snag where they click the thing and they can’t get past it, and you just lost the one most importantest customer ever.

But take a deep breath, there will be more customers. Your market size is bigger than 10 (if you’re doing it right). The problem is we get so afraid of losing that 1 person that we forget the real solution isn’t a better product, it’s a bigger funnel.

If you only have 1 lead, yeah, losing them feels like the end of the world. But if you have 50? 100? That 1 that didn’t work out isn’t keeping you up at night anymore.

That’s why marketing matters so much. You have to build a way to consistently get people in the door so that no single bug, no single bad experience, can sink you.

The real risk

But here’s what I’ve learned (the hard way), the bigger risk isn’t that something breaks. The bigger risk is that nobody ever sees what you built.

You’re sitting there polishing and tweaking and testing by yourself when you could have actual users telling you what’s actually broken. And those early users? That’s like 10 people. Maybe 20. That is a tiny fraction of your total market. If something embarrassing happens in front of them, you fix it, you move on, and they usually respect you more for being responsive.

Meanwhile, those 10 people will teach you more about your product in a week than you’ll learn testing alone for a month.

My challenge to you

So here’s my challenge. Take $500. Put it toward marketing. Run some ads. Do some outreach. Whatever makes sense for your audience. I promise you will learn more from that $500 than from another month of sitting in your code editor hunting edge cases.

Your product doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be seen.

I’ve even heard of founders selling before they have a product just to test demand. That doesn’t work in every scenario, but it tells you something — the sale matters just as much as the build.

So where are you on the spectrum? Heavy on product with no sales? Or sales with no product? Something to think about.