Embrace the chaos

Starting something new is messy. You don’t know exactly where you’re going. You try one direction and a hit a dead-end. Try another. You’ll get fully emerged into a new piece of technology, only to hit a unsurmountable roadblock and be back at square one. Your code will be mess. Your UI lacks structure. Your UX full of glaring problems. When you fix one bug, three new ones pop up. But only sometimes. With some browsers. And of course you’re unable to reliably reproduce these.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll see a multitude of opportunities to clean up. To streamline the design. Remove unused assets. Refactor that piece of code you wrote late last night.

Don’t.

Early on when building your startup, chaos is your friend. That mess of a HTML template? It reminds you it’s okay to be scrappy. The customer won’t mind. Making that border radius consistent with rest can wait. It’s okay.

Enjoy the moment. Pretty soon you’ll have your structure. You’ll have a working product. And better yet, customers!

But this comes at a price. Rigidity. Changes will be harder to make. Bugs more costly. You’ll long for the chaos. Back when anything was possible.

Embrace the chaos… while you still can.

(written at 4:04am without grammar check. sorry)