From the Twitterverse today, from @JamesClear:

When the cycle time is short, focus on quantity. Ship more, learn faster.
When the cycle time is long, focus on quality. Few shots, make them count.

I love this heuristic. Not just because it’s punchy, but because it’s also nature-inspired. Think about it, that’s roughly the strategies how animals reproduce. When your life cycle is short, like say insects, they reproduce in huge numbers to ‘spray and pray’ - more offspring means more will survive. When life cycle is longer, like in mammals or us human, they focus on caring for one or a few offspring to make them count. Biomimicry is a useful idea for product makers, because we sure can learn a lot from Mother Nature who spent millions of years perfecting its products (animals and us humans).

But back to the heuristic. Understanding the time cycles of our industry, niche and our own maker journey can also help guide us in our approach our products. 

If your product is used one-time for a short time only (e.g. coupon deals, insta-stories), ship more and learn from which one works well over time. Because it’s used in a disposable manner, you got to keep producing content, but also means you learn and figure out what works well really fast. The opposite is also true - if you want to learn fast about what works, you shorten the cycle. That’s basically why designers prototype products to test them out, before committing to the longer cycle of perfecting it. That’s also how I had been approaching my maker journey, as I wanted to learn fast about what works in the market and for myself, what products have product-market fit and founder-market fit. 

If your product is used for a longer timeframe (e.g. a smartphone, or a car), it makes sense to make it count, since people are presumably spending more to buy it, and they would want to make sure they get bang for their buck. That’s when adopting a craftsman mindset and approach is helpful, and sharing the back story and process of how you’re building it works. Many indie hackers do this too, but after they have found something which has validated potential, or they are just too damned passionate about. 

So it’s not a dichotomous zero sum game where it’s either quantity or quality. Both has its uses in certain contexts.