How Accurate Is “Good Enough”? (And Why Most Founders Guess Wrong)

Let’s talk about a founder’s favorite trap: the pursuit of perfection. If you’ve ever shipped a product, you’ve probably had that nagging feeling—just a bit more polish, one more bug fix, a sprinkle of extra features, and then it’ll be ready. But what if “good enough” is actually the secret weapon?

A friend of mine recently built an internal tool for their ops team. The deadline was brutal. The features were half-baked. The UI? Let’s call it “minimalist” and move on. It barely worked. Yet, within a week, the ops team refused to go back to their old spreadsheet.

When my friend asked why, the head of ops just shrugged and said, “We don’t need it to be perfect. We just need it to be more right than before.”

That phrase—“more right than before”—stuck with me. It’s a mantra most founders need tattooed somewhere visible.

The Precision Trap

Founders, especially those with a technical background, are notorious for chasing precision. You built the engine, so you see every loose bolt and rattling part. It’s tempting to believe that if you just tune it tighter, optimize that function, add a few more logs, or refactor for elegance, you’ll finally impress that imaginary CTO in the sky.

But here’s the thing: your users don’t care about your code’s elegance. Not at first. They care about whether their job just got easier, even if only by a little bit.

So, how precise does your product actually need to be to win? Are you optimizing for the user’s real job-to-be-done, or your own standard of perfection?

The Hidden Cost of Over-Optimization

If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your time refining things nobody asked for. You’ll polish the dashboard until it gleams, but that crucial feature (the one that actually solves a user’s pain) will languish in the backlog.

Startup life is full of 80% solutions that look rough but unlock real value. Think about the two-month workaround that gets adopted company-wide, or the hacked-together feature that lets your support team finally take a lunch break. These aren’t elegant. They aren’t finished. But they work, and they matter.

Startups aren’t precision machines. They’re messy organisms. You’re not building a Swiss watch. You’re building traction, and traction is often ugly.

The Opportunity Cost

Let’s do the math. If you spend 10 weeks chasing the last 1% of accuracy, most users won’t even notice. Meanwhile, that tiny win (the one that would’ve made their day) is still sitting in your backlog, untouched.

My friend? He never fixed the bugs. The team adopted the tool, warts and all. He moved on to the next messy win, and then the next. He stopped worshipping at the altar of precision and started measuring usefulness.

Everything changed.

What Promise Did You Make?

Here’s the question every founder should ask: What promise did your product quietly make? Is precision the value, or are you just fixated on it? Sometimes, “more right than before” is the whole job.

If you’re feeling stuck, remember: your users want progress, not perfection. They want their lives to be a little easier, a little better. They don’t need you to win an engineering award. They need you to move the needle.

So, next time you’re tempted to chase another round of tweaks, ask yourself: Is this for my user, or for my ego?

Sometimes, “good enough” is exactly what your startup needs to grow. And sometimes, it’s the only way you’ll ever get to great.

A Final Thought

If you’re a founder wrestling with where to draw the line, try measuring usefulness instead of flawlessness. Ship the rough draft. See what happens. You might be surprised at how little your users care about polish—and how much they value progress.

And if you ever need a reminder, just remember: more right than before. That’s usually enough.

Lovable.dev is now doing $1m in new subscription revenue DAILY, but is Validate AI better?

If you’ve been anywhere near startup Twitter lately, you’ve probably seen the numbers:

Lovable.dev is now pulling in $1M/day in new subscription revenue. Insane.

And rightly so, it’s an incredibly well-executed product. Dead-simple. Crazy fast. Feels like using Figma and Notion had a baby that builds apps while you sip yerba mate.

For everything it does RIGHT, Lovable is overkill when you just want to quickly validate a business idea. Enter Validate AI. A purpose-built “business idea validator in a box.” For when you just want to quickly check whether an idea has legs, or not.

Validate AI is not “better” than Lovable.

UNLESS you’re validating a brand new business idea.

Because Validate AI doesn’t just make pretty landing pages.

It builds:

• A real Business Validation Plan (not just vibes and gradients)

• A full Competitive Landscape Analysis (with actual surprising results—more on that below)

• A live, conversion-optimized landing page with copy written to sell your idea

• And a dead-simple way to chat with the landing page to make changes

All in under 2 minutes. Seriously.

Don’t take my word for it…

Why we built this:

(“We” meaning my buddy Ron and I)

We kept meeting two kinds of founders:

The Dreamers, who never took a single step to validate an idea…

…and the Overbuilders, who bought a domain, filed an LLC, and built 7 features before talking to a single customer.

Validate AI exists to bring both sides to “the middle”. The happy place. The Good Place.

To help you test an idea, share it, and see if anyone bites, without burning a month or $5K on freelancers.

So is it better than Lovable?

No.

It’s different.

Lovable is for when you know what you’re building.

Validate AI is for when you’re still figuring that out.

Try it for free.

👉 https://vldt.ai

💡 Business Idea of the Week

Hackathon-in-a-Box (feat. Chaos Lab)

Corporate hackathons are broken. Most feel like forced fun with stale snacks and zero follow-through.

Enter: Hackathon-in-a-Box 

A plug-and-play platform for enterprise innovation teams that automates the whole mess:

✅ Team formation (balanced by skills + roles)

✅ Digital workspaces + demo day tools

✅ Judging + post-event implementation templates

Charge $5K–$15K per event, upsell to annual subs, and wedge into org-wide innovation.

And yes — it even supports formats like “Chaos Lab”, my favorite high-stakes team-shuffling hackathon. (6 hours in: rip teams apart, keep only the PM, watch the room melt. It’s beautiful.)

Real innovation feels chaotic. This makes it productive, too.

Could be a killer SaaS play for anyone targeting mid-market tech cos with flatlining R&D.

THE END

As always, thanks for reading 🙂 

Let me know what you’d like to read about!

With ❤️,
— John Hancock