Nov 4, 2025 · 4 min read
The dominant narrative in tech is one of relentless speed. We're told to launch quickly, fail fast, and blitzscale our way to market leadership. The prevailing wisdom is that growth at all costs is the only way to win.
But after years of observing what makes products truly last, I've come to believe this is a dangerous myth. The most enduring, beloved products I've seen were not built with a focus on speed and scale. They were built with a deliberate, almost stubborn, focus on quality and craft. They didn't try to win the whole market at once; they obsessed over winning a small, specific corner of it first.
The most common mistake I see is teams trying to build a product for "everyone." A product designed for everyone is, almost by definition, a product that is exceptional for no one. It is an exercise in compromise and mediocrity.
The most powerful product visions are born from a place of deep personal conviction. The founders of a now-dominant project management tool weren't trying to solve a hypothetical problem for a generic user persona. They were frustrated designers and engineers at top tech companies, and they set out to build a tool that they would love to use. They were their own ideal customer.
This is a critical starting point. When you are building for yourself, you have an intuitive, almost unfair advantage. You understand the nuances of the workflow, you feel the pain of the existing solutions, and you have an uncompromisingly high bar for quality. Your "user research" is your own daily experience.
The next step is to validate that you are not alone. The founding team of that project management tool spent over a year running informal, unstructured user research with their peers—other high-performing individual contributors at fast-growing tech companies. They weren't pitching a solution; they were validating a shared frustration. This pre-work gave them the conviction that their personal problem was also a market problem.
Once you have this conviction, the temptation is to open the floodgates and let everyone in. The unscalable approach does the opposite. Instead of a public launch that attracts a wide and varied audience, you create a private beta with a velvet rope.
This strategy uses a waitlist not just as a tool for capturing emails, but as a qualification mechanism. To get an invite, potential users should be asked to explain why they want to use the product and what problems they are facing with their current tools.
This allows you to hand-pick your first users. You aren't looking for a large number of tire-kickers; you are looking for a small cohort of highly motivated, perfect-fit customers who feel the pain most acutely. By onboarding them in small, controlled groups, you gain two powerful benefits:
With this curated group of early users, your roadmap becomes incredibly clear. The work falls into two simple categories:
A disciplined early-stage roadmap is a constant balancing act between delighting your core users with enablers and methodically removing blockers to expand your addressable market.
The path to building an iconic product is rarely a story of explosive, overnight growth. More often, it is a story of deliberate, patient craftsmanship. It is about having the courage to serve a niche audience exceptionally well before trying to take on the world. It is about prioritizing quality over speed, and conviction over consensus.
This unscalable, quality-first approach is not just a different way to build a company; it's a more sustainable one. It allows you to build a product that people genuinely love, a loyal customer base that becomes your best marketing channel, and a business that has the freedom to grow on its own terms, not just chase the next venture capital-fueled trend.