Don't be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product. — Eric Ries

Don't be in a rush to get big. Be in a rush to have a great product.

Author: Eric Ries

Insight: Most of us feel the pressure to scale, expand, prove ourselves bigger. We watch competitors raise funding, hire teams, launch in new markets, and wonder if we're falling behind. But there's something quietly subversive about actually taking time to get the fundamentals right. A great product doesn't need as much marketing spin or venture capital rescue—it creates its own momentum because people actually want to use it and tell others about it. The counterintuitive part is that rushing toward bigness often makes your core offering worse, not better. You dilute focus, chase trends instead of solving real problems, and end up managing growth rather than enjoying it. Meanwhile, teams obsessed with having something genuinely excellent tend to stumble into scale almost accidentally. Their users do the work for them. This matters today especially because we've normalized the startup mythology of "grow at all costs." But that framing leaves people burned out and companies fragile. If you spend your energy on what actually works—on understanding what people need and delivering it cleanly—you're not being slow or cautious. You're being strategic about which problems are worth solving first. Bigness will come if the product deserves it. That's a much steadier foundation than the alternative.