Uncertain World

One of the reasons that overanalysis doesn't help too much for launching products or services is because of the uncertain nature of our world. We want certainty that things will work before making a decision, but the reality is that it's a game of probabilities. Most of the times even the probabilities are just approximations.

Jason Fried has a great article about applying this idea to product design:

There’s really only one real way to get as close to certain as possible. That’s to build the actual thing and make it actually available for anyone to try, use, and buy. Real usage on real things on real days during the course of real work is the only way to validate anything. And even then, it’s barely validation since there are so many other variables at play. Timing, marketing, pricing, messaging, etc.

You can’t validate something that doesn’t exist. You can’t validate an idea. You can’t validate someone’s guess. You can’t validate an abstraction. You can’t validate a sketch, or a wireframe, or an MVP that isn’t the actual product.