🐺 Builders Build Perfection. Sellers Sell Imperfection. New Community Preview

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I’m excited to announce the upcoming launch of "Lone Wolf AI League", a new premium Skool community for people determined to become the AI resource inside their company, agency, executive room, board room or marketplace.

Inside Lone Wolf AI League, I will share real-world AI strategy, deal strategy, wins, losses, client conversations, consulting realities, business execution, and what it actually takes to compete in the AI economy.

This post is an example of the type of content and conversations we will explore inside the community.

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Last night, I came across the Reid Hoffman quote:

“If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

I have seen this quote many times, but last night it brought back a wave of nostalgia because it connects directly to something I have experienced over 30 years of building software, launching companies, and surviving technology disruption.

Over the last 30 years, I have built more than 100 software applications, large and small. I have started four technology companies. My first startup, in 1999, raised $100,000 in capital. At the time, that was big money to me.

We spent six months building a highly specialized eCommerce SaaS model for the brand merchandising industry. We financed an $80,000 server running Windows NT 4, built on a Classic ASP stack, and later moved to .NET. We wanted to go open source, but MySQL was still in its infancy. Java felt like space-age technology. JSON was just starting to look promising. We were in the middle of a 10-year browser war, and you could not practically email a file larger than 1 MB.

After a successful launch, we invested another $100,000 in servers and software. We sold SaaS eCommerce subscriptions for $2,500 per month. We thought we were building the future.

Then Yahoo launched website and shopping cart capabilities for about $25 per month, and overnight, the industry shifted beneath our feet.

Our model was not only under attack. It took a direct hit because customers saw price, but often did not understand the nuance between small retail websites and enterprise eCommerce.

And that was not the last time it happened.

Every couple of years, something changed.

New technology.

New competitors.

New economics.

I can still remember gathering our small team on a Friday after some big industry disruption and asking:

"With the same time, talent, technology, and tenacity, what else can we do?"

Literally.

We would talk through it, and by Monday, we often had a new operating model.

Over twelve years, we reinvented ourselves six times in all.

We started as an on-premise custom eCommerce software developer running Windows NT solutions. We eventually became an email marketing and file-sharing SaaS company, with products like Winning With Email and EcoView.

Remember, this was between 2000 and 2012.

Green initiatives were trending. Saving paper mattered. Email marketing was exploding. File sharing was becoming practical. Customer expectations were changing fast.

So we changed too.

Looking back, I realize there were three things happening then that are still relevant today.

1️⃣ Builders were building toward perfection.

2️⃣ Sellers were selling imperfection, meaning they were selling the next version before it was fully finished.

3️⃣ The rate of change was relevant to the environment around them.

That last point matters.

Perfection is not absolute.

It is contextual.

What looked perfect in one market could become outdated six months later. What felt advanced in one technology cycle could become table stakes in the next. What customers valued one year could become irrelevant the next.

And guess what?

If you are a solopreneur, all of this is happening inside your own head.

You are the builder.

You are the seller.

You are the strategist.

You are the person deciding whether to spend another month improving the product or start selling what already exists.

If you are a team of 5, 10, or 50, the same tension exists inside the organization.

The builders want to make it better.

The sellers want to get it in front of customers.

The market is changing while both sides are debating.

That is the lesson I keep coming back to.

Builders build perfection.