polish vs profit

One of my favorite business books is called “Ready, Fire, Aim.”

It was written by a guy named Michael Masterson, who co-founded a multi-billion dollar company called Agora.

And it's a concept I learned early on in my direct response marketing career.

The philosophy itself is pretty self-explanatory…

You want to "fire" (aka launch or take action) as quickly as possible instead of wasting time perfecting everything…

Then "aim" (aka refine based on feedback).

This approach has served me well over the years.

It's why speed was a central focus of my writing methodology long before AI was even a thing.

But I feel like it's become 100x more important now in the age of AI.

Here's why:

In the AI era, speed of execution matters more than ever because everyone has access to the same information and tools.

The only real competitive advantage left is how fast you can move from idea to implementation.

Perfectionism is a luxury you can't afford anymore.

Case in point:

I just rebuilt my entire AI SaaS product from scratch in 15 days.

Before this, I'd never touched one of these new coding tools…

Let alone written a line of code lol

Yet in two frigging weeks, I not only rebuilt the whole thing…

But I also added a TON of new features that are going to make it soooooooo much more powerful than the 1.0 version.

Absolutely bonkers.

Now, if you're spending weeks (or months) perfecting your newsletter, course outline, or product before launching it…

You're already behind.

Your competitors are shipping imperfect stuff daily and learning from real feedback.

The market rewards action and iteration, not polish and planning.

Every day you spend planning is a day you could be collecting data, making sales, and getting better.

Because 9 times out of 10:

The “imperfections” we obsess over as creators and entrepreneurs don’t even register for customers.

So keep that in mind :)

Jim Hamilton

P.S:

In order to embrace the “ready, fire, aim” philosophy…

You first need to make peace with looking silly in front of other people.

This comes with the creator territory.

Another example from my recent foray into building software:

Yesterday, I sent out beta-test invites to a small group of clients, community members, and power users.

Which was pretty nerve-wracking.

Now, I’ve been testing and using the platform myself for several days now…

Relentless debugging one thing after another like Neo battling all those clones of Agent Smith…

And I felt pretty confident that the new platform was (mostly) functional.

Alas, the code gods said “not so fast” lol

I fired it up this morning to start writing a few emails and promptly encountered some bizarre bug I’d never seen before 🙃

PERFECT TIMING!

Right as I onboard my first batch of beta-testers.

Anyway, it’s fixed now…

(turns out, it was related to scaling up the server capacity)

But I share this to show you that I’m out here looking silly in front of other people everyday lol

I encourage you to do the same ;)