# Small and riskless bets There’s no need to build a large and complex product right off the bat. The longer it takes to deliver a first “sellable” version of a product, the riskier it is. There are basically no upsides to building something big right away, apart from burning cash (which some people seem to enjoy doing): - It takes much longer and thus costs a lot more - It is much more complex - It pushes us to rigidify the way things work and thus become less Agile - Failing hurts a lot Building something big right away is closely related to overconfidence. If we’re certain something is going to be a success, then we tend to go _all-in_. But the truth is that most startup projects fail. And when a project you’ve put a ton of effort into fails, it hurts. It took me a long time to get back on my feet after I’ve realized the project I had spent two thousand hours on was going nowhere. Moreover, because of the [[Sunk Cost Fallacy]], it’s harder to let go of a failing project. Once you’ve invested a lot of time, energy, and money into something, you don’t want to abandon it. You want to keep trying. Implement one more feature, fix one more bug. Hope one more day. But the longer it keeps going, the worse it gets! Small and riskless bets are on the other side of the spectrum. With those, we invest little time, little money, and focus on moving fast. We still approach the work seriously and with all our energy, but we drastically reduce the risks involved. With small and riskless bets, one can be bold and try many more things in much less time. It’s an approach that is actually recommended by successful entrepreneurs like [[Sahil Lavingia]], the founder of Gumroad in [[The Minimalist Entrepreneur (book)]], and [[Pieter Levels]]. Pieter summarized it well with this tweet: https://x.com/levelsio/status/1457315274466594817 ![[Small and riskless bets - Pieter Levels projects.png]] When you realize this, you can’t argue that making small bets is a much better way to go. We get to explore many more ideas in a much shorter time frame, and we can quickly sense what works and what doesn’t. So, there you go, that’s my one piece of advice for today: don’t fall into the same trap as I did. Avoid being too ambitious right away. Instead, make small and riskless bets. Explore more ideas, and focus on getting those out the door as quickly as you can. That way, you’ll invalidate your assumptions faster, and you’ll be able to move on to the next project. Having multiple ongoing projects and basically doing a small and riskless bet that's it away to avoid the big void that you can get when you just bet everything on the singer project and then fails that deletes the risks increases the chances of success because when you have multiple projects and you have more chances of having success with well done rather than having a single big project in which putting everything and then without something similar to this test ## References - https://newsletter.dsebastien.net/issues/developassion-s-newsletter-small-and-riskless-bets-846960 - https://open.spotify.com/episode/4QmOpsmEsNa5K3ld58Zuys?si=SFTYryJFT42txS3ARCdfKQ