The developer’s dilemma: Perfection vs Speed

Hello builders,

If you’ve been following recent Twitter discussions, you might have noticed the (bad) buzz around ShipFast by Marc Louvion.
It came under fire for security issues that allowed users to access his product for free (fixed now).
This made me think of the following question for SaaS creators: should you launch quickly to test the waters, or make sure every detail is perfect before going live?

By every detail, I mean more than security.

This is a frequent conversation between me and my business partner to arbitrate priorities. She worked for several years for a big corporation to provide highly scalable APIs (called billion times 🤯), secured and every feature went through rigorous testing. Bugs in production weren’t allowed, and I’m not only talking about security. She tends to advocate for a more perfectionist approach than me. I worked in big corp too, I know the challenges but I was more doing MVPs to prove a concept value for clients than deploying in production a critical app.

Now, let’s see the two teams, and we will see they both are corrects, when and why join which team.

Team A: The Choice of perfection

Some founders take months to polish every aspect of their SaaS:

- ensuring the infrastructure can support thousands of users from day one
- seamless interface
- unit test everywhere
- impeccable code
- collect users needs
- polishing business plan for months
- designing a beautiful logo, refining UX

This approach is ideal for:
- companies with huge traffic to ensure the service won’t be down
- industries that demand high security like banks (don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying security isn’t important in other domains 🙃 it is essential to protect critical aspects like users data)
- Startups that wants to be raise money with Business Angels
- If you sell your design service, you better have a good looking website 😁

That was my entrepreneurship approach 10 years ago, but you never know, I mght one day have an opportunity and join that team again.

Team B: The choice of speed and iteration

Others take a faster route, launching a functional SaaS very quickly with a conviction, a straightforward design and basic, but working, code.
The goal is to test market interest and validate the idea before investing months into development. This approach lets you stay agile and quickly adapt based on user feedback. If minor flaws remain in your app—such as a loophole allowing free access —this is a downside for you but doesn’t directly impact your clients.

That’s what I choose for IACrea, I started with a basic MVP, the design was ok but not handsome. I didn’t have a logo. There was only one feature. The feature was to renovate a home, it worked but the first version was very basic, the quality was correct but could be improved.

Yet, this was enough to test the concept.

Same for cortexsheet that I launch a month ago, quickly to see the interest. It worked, several persons paid the service.

Then what? Once you find PMF with your MVP, you can improve it, add new features, etc. Otherwise, you can pivot without having wasted too much time, and learn from that experience.

I spent around six months after launching my first SaaS (crypto trading alerts) trying to find clients. I didn’t find a single one, but I kept trying. Maybe I did some things wrong—someone else might have marketed it perfectly. But not me; I estimate I lost five months with that SaaS.

Ressources for team B made by indie hackers:

• Boilerplates to build quickly iOS apps: Wrapfast , made by @juanjovn

• Boilerplates for SaaS depending on your stack: Shipfast by @Marc_louvion, Supastarter by @jonathan_wilke or Larafast by @karakhanyanS

• Cursor, chatGPT, Claude as developer’s mate

In both cases…

Regardless of your chosen approach, launching quickly doesn’t mean ignoring data security and laws isn’t an option. Even for an MVP, you need basic protections for user data to comply with regulations like the GDPR in Europe. Ensuring user data security should be a priority, even if the rest of your product is still in testing.

So, perfection or speed? The key is to find a balance depending on your objective and to be comfortable with your choices.

PS: All my support to Marc and all other indie makers being criticized. Building in public is hard.

Personal updates

• I’m launching soon an affiliation SaaS indie hacker’s friendly, reply to me if you’re interested to beta test it !