Fast Fail: Ditch What Doesn’t Work 🚀

Hey,

It’s Yoela, reporting live again from a late-night session in Tokyo! Just watched one of our devs blow up the rulebook by building five more apps in a single night using AI tools. But before we get into that wild ride, let me rewind to where my own journey in building began.

As most of you already know (from last week’s edition) my story started with pure survival. The thing about survival instinct - it cuts through all the fluff. When I dropped out of college, I wasn't thinking about unicorns or venture capital. I was thinking about what would make money, as soon as humanly possible. People told me this practicality would limit my dreams. Turns out, it became my superpower.

Back to that dev cranking out 5 apps in one night. Out of those, guess how many actually showed real promise? Two. After more iteration? Just one. And that’s the unfiltered ratio nobody talks about in startup land. While everyone else polishes pitch decks and rehearses their “visionary” story, real builders are out there testing, failing, learning, and testing again.

A great example is from Dropbox. They made an explainer video and got 70,000 initial signups before making the product.

A big data study of 46 years of VC investments found prior failure to be “the essential prerequisite for success.” This showed that founders who tested multiple ideas quickly (up to 10 ideas) and kill them fast have a 65% success rate compared to 10% success rate from a single attempt.

This hits at something deeper I’ve noticed after years in the game: the people most obsessed with credentials, status, the “right” background or experience and perfect timing struggle to launch something real more frequently. Just had to cut someone from my network because their whole personality was Ivy League degrees and Big 4 buzzwords. Zero value creation, 100% name dropping. Gotta practice what I preach, even in my friend circle 😉

Let’s be real: the market doesn’t care where you went to school, your flawless plan, or your “potential.” It cares about one thing: can you solve real problems and create value?

This is why I love what our team is doing now. We're not playing the status game. We're building. Testing. Learning. That one promising app from our dev's experiment? It's a simple AI tool that actually solves a real problem for developers and will make my own life easier when comparing solutions & products in a very specific vertical. No fancy pitch deck needed. Just real value creation at a micro scale.

The biggest game changer for me? Realizing that value creation isn’t about grand visions or market timing; it’s about building something real, putting it in front of actual users, and iterating based on what actually works. Everything else? Just startup theater.

Want to know the real playbook for 2024?

• Build fast (like, really fast)

• Test with real users

• Kill your darlings quickly

• Double down on what works

• Repeat

There's a reason it's a circle, it's a continuous cycle, just like life. You don’t stop after just one iteration, you keep going, learning, and evolving.

I look around at the startup ecosystem now and see so many people waiting. Waiting to be ready. Waiting to be certain. Waiting to be expert enough. But what a decade plus of building has taught me: The people who win aren’t the ones who wait—they’re the ones who jump in, learn as they go, and adapt faster than the rest.

They're the ones who start before they're ready. They're the ones who test before they're certain. They're the ones who build before they're expert.

So, what are you building?

Until next time,

Yoela

P.S. Got an idea but not sure how to test it? Reply and I’d be happy to provide some feedback :)