You don't need the perfect product - you need a product that works

In every business, perfectionism is one of the most costly forms of risk. Sometimes, a launch is delayed simply because the founder believes the product is not yet ready. The team invests months or even years in development in a vacuum, only to discover that progress has moved on or that the market was never interested in the first place.

Last year, Visa did not wait for all stablecoin use cases to be perfected, butlaunched them through limited pilots in Visa Direct together with selected partners. Even the launch of USDC settlement in the US at the end of 2025 with the first banking participants looked exactly like a controlled rollout: first, a working model was launched in a real environment, and then it was scaled up.

In the financial technology sector, the stakes are always high due totighter regulation and strict rules, but the bottom line remains the same: customers don’t need the perfect product, they need a reliable solution to a real problem that is timely for them.

Quality needs market feedback

The desire to play it safe is understandable. However, it is important to remember the critical difference between non-negotiable standards and everything else, such as the ideal interface, beautifully reworked code, or the latest infrastructure. Spending a year honing your internal vision of quality without real users does not reduce risk, but merely postpones it for a year.

Quality without feedback from the market easily turns into an internal fantasy. I’ve been through this myself more than once in different projects: the team polishes the interface, rewrites the code, argues about details, and it seems that we are just one step away from perfection. But at this point, customers often go to those who simply gave them a working solution.

A better way to launch

Therefore, my approach has changed quite radically. The MVP should be launched as early as possible, even if there is a feeling that the product is still not quite ready. It is better to choose the first customers from among the most loyal ones and immediately explain honestly that this is an early version and that the team will be in constant contact. Next, rhythm is important: short iterations, for example, every two weeks, but not based on internal feelings, but based on what customers actually say and do.

It is the market that tells the truth. Not the team, not the mentor, and not the founder’s intuition, but real users who either pay or don’t pay. Dropboxconfirmed demand not with a finished product, but with a simple video demo published before the full launch, and Zappos did so withmanual fulfillment of orders without a full-fledged infrastructure. In both cases, it was not perfection that won, but the speed of hypothesis testing. The lesson for fintech is the same: customers don’t need a perfect product. They need a product that works.