Voltaire once said that “The best is the enemy of the good.” That’s a great poetic summary of the Golden Mean—the philosophical recognition that there is always an optimal target between the extremes of excess and deficiency.
Wise investors understand that some founders gets too caught up in perfecting their product. They put off going to market because there’s always more room for improvement. But the investor understands from their repeated experience that it’s often not until a product hits the market that the most important areas for improvement reveal themselves. Investors would rather get a good version of a product out the door, and then learn quickly where to adapt, than to delay a launch until a founder feels like it’s perfect.
This tendency is not unique to founders. Artists and designers are similarly driven by perfection. In my twenty-eight year experience working in the creative services world I don’t ever remember a designer delivering a concept or layout thinking that what they presented was perfect. They always feel that if they only had a little more time, it could have been better. But that potential improvement runs up against the law of diminishing returns between the good and the perfect. And while the designer, or the founder, may feel a deep desire to make their product perfect, the financial interests of the business demand that perfectionism give way to professional discipline and serve the higher demands of the business.
RPcd exercises creative discipline to get our clients a solid, professional, on-target solution, within the constraints of the more urgent business realities for speed and predictable costs that are the higher demands of the startup experience. We are able to find that Golden Mean through the experienced eye of Ray Parrish, a well-crafted design communication process, rapid focus group testing to check your own, and our own biases, and an efficient processes to get the best, on-target solution that will accelerate your startup to the next stage of your businesses growth.