Citizen Agency

Another brilliant post at Signal vs. Noise…this one on fear and scaling…

The flip-side is that you need to recognize genuine threats — even if they’re “boring� issues. Things like these are a lot more likely to actually cripple your chances of success:Taking forever to launch
Running out of money
Not solving a real problem
Designing a confusing UI
Obsessing over the wrong things
Trying to do too much at once

Never ignore real here-and-now threats in order to focus on maybe-in-the-future threats.

It’s the kind of thing we are trying to teach with our Embrace the Chaos theory with our clients. We’ve watched so many startups spend so much time, energy and money on preparing for the MySpace-like onslaught of users. Having so many people loving your product that you had to start worrying about scaling would probably be a good problem to have, methinks.

I also think that if you think you think you need to scale before you put time and money and effort into making your product delightful and amazing, you really needn’t…