17 July 2006

Anything New Takes Time

I recently added "Crossroads Dispatches" to the ever-growing list of blogs I keep an eye on.  I liked the fusion of touchy-feely and hard-nosed reality.  Something like my lifestyle that attempts to fuse web entrepreneurship with self-sufficient living and growing my own food.  Something like Sushi - the blandness of Rice with the Bland/Salty fish and the BITE of Wasabi.

In Crossroads Dispatches: Living Takes Time, Thinking Big Takes Time, Ms Rodriguez writes about how many fast-paced people discover that going more slowly really enables them to go faster, but only after some (often severe) personal crisis.

This brings to mind the oft-touted common wisdom of Internet startups: "If you can't get something up and running within a couple of (days|weeks|months) you probably don't have anything. You probably don't understand what it is you're wanting to build."

What horse-shit.  Frequently this comes from people who are not programmers, and who have no clue of all the intricacies and complexities involved in designing, building, debugging, deploying, managing and enhancing an application; least of all a distributed application.  Now try this all by yourself. You get to do everything yourself.  There's nobody else to lean on to put together the graphics or to install the database or to spot the stupid mistake that's going to take you half a day to figure out by yourself.  There's no-one who will listen to your ideas and tell you when you're spouting crap or just in love with the smell of your own shit.

Its hard work, and it takes time.  Lots of time.  And you're better off going slowly than trying to meet the bullshit expectations of some alleged common wisdom. 

As you may gather, I have been working on a new New Venture for some weeks now (which also accounts for the sporadic and irregular blog posting) and am about halfway through the development cycle.

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