Essay · 12 min read

The Product Builder's True Journey

Shreyas Doshi · Shreyas Doshi (Substack) Free Advanced

Doshi names the IKEA effect, how you overvalue what you built simply because you built it, which is the quiet engine behind gold-plating. It pushes you toward judgment about what matters over the reflex to keep improving your own creation. Best for the founder who suspects attachment, not need, is driving the polish.

  • You overvalue what you build, so discount your own certainty.
  • More features and polish are not the same as more impact.
  • Judgment about what to skip beats effort spent building.
Open on shreyasdoshi.substack.com ↗

It answers 2 questions

  1. I keep polishing the design and refactoring instead of shipping. How do I know I'm gold-plating my MVP versus doing necessary work?
  2. When is it right to stop iterating on a feature and just kill it?

Read with it

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  5. Michael Seibel's crisp framing of holding the problem and customer tightly while holding the solution loosely, the mindset that... Y Combinator Startup Library Video · ~15 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel
  6. Video · ~13 min How to Plan an MVP Michael Seibel (YC)
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