Armstrong offers this as advice for the earliest stage of a start-up, before a product has found its market. He recalls a line from Paul Graham of Y Combinator, that start-ups are like sharks which die if they stop swimming, and adds his own image of climbing a fog-covered mountain where only a few steps are visible: each step taken reveals the next.

The point is that deliberation cannot settle questions only a market can answer. Building and releasing something, even something flawed, yields evidence about what to do next. Armstrong recalls knowing a feature was built wrongly the moment it shipped, yet that knowledge came only from building it.

He had voiced the same maxim in 2020 on Invest Like the Best, observing that most people discuss ideas without acting on them, that first versions are usually embarrassing, and that an initial attempt will almost certainly fail, so the answer is to try the next thing.

Full quotation

“Yeah. Well, if you’re pre-product market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is action produces information. So just like keep doing stuff. You know, I remember like Paul Graham. Paul Graham had this great line like that. I think that’s his line. And he was like, startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming, they die. You know, so even if you’re like not sure what to do, like just do anything because when you do it, it’ll produce some information. Like people liked it, they didn’t. This was very true for me. There was times where I just did something instead of debating it endlessly and like just try it. You know, like, all right, so we shipped it. And like there was a couple of times where like the minute I shipped it, I was like, I know we built this wrong, but now I have an idea of what to do next. And it wasn’t, I only would have had the idea if we’d actually gone through the exercise of going to build it. It’s like, my other favorite analogy for this is that you’re like at the base of a mountain that’s shrouded in fog, and you’re looking up at the mountain and you’re trying to think like, okay, how do I get up there? But you can only see like three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into the unknown. And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you’ll end up on some local maximum, you’ll have to retrace your steps or whatever, but, or come up to a cliff, you know? But most people in life don’t take the steps into the fog.”