Shipped doesn't mean done

There's a version of "done is better than perfect" that becomes its own trap.

You ship something. You mark it done in your head. You feel the relief of pushing it out the door and you move on to the next thing. For a while that's the right call — perfectionism kills more businesses than shipping does. But yesterday I spent an entire day going back into a project I had already shipped and fixing twelve things.

Not twelve cosmetic things. Twelve things that were silently wrong: access gates refusing the right people, a download feature that never appeared for the folders people actually needed, images that broke on certain machines, a status badge that was supposed to clear after an action but stayed stuck forever. Each one was quiet. No alarms. Just someone somewhere getting refused when they should have gotten in, probably assuming it was their fault.

This is the part the Sheryl Sandberg quote doesn't cover.

Done means the loop closes. The thing starts. The thing ends. The right thing happens in between. A lot of what we call shipped is actually: it starts, it mostly works when conditions are ideal, and we haven't seen the edges yet.

The days that don't count

I've learned to respect the days that produce nothing you'd want to announce. No new feature. No launch. No headline. Just: I went back in. I fixed the thing I said I'd fixed. I closed the gap between what I claimed the product does and what it actually does.

These days feel like they don't count. The work log looks like maintenance. Nobody sends congratulations. But I think these are actually the days where trustworthy businesses get built — not in the launches but in the willingness to return.

An entrepreneur who can't go back and close broken loops quietly will eventually build a pile of things that are "shipped" in the nominal sense and unusable in the actual one. The product looks fine from the outside because you never have to use it yourself. Your customers don't have that option.

The advice I try to live by now is closer to: ship fast, then close the loop. Not ship it and forget it. Not hold it until it's flawless. Ship it knowing you'll be back, and then actually go back.

Nobody congratulates you for twelve loops closed. But twelve fewer reasons for someone to give up on what you built is the whole point.