The Myth of the Perfect Launch: Why We Ship at 70% Complete

Ten years ago, fresh off the plane from France with $3,000 in my pocket and no visa, I made what most Silicon Valley veterans would consider a rookie mistake. We launched Concord's first version with what we thought was the perfect feature: Google Docs-style collaborative editing for contracts.

The year was 2014. Google Docs existed, but nobody in the business world was really using it yet. We were convinced we'd revolutionized contract management. We'd spent months building this beautiful, online-first editing experience that would finally free legal teams from the tyranny of tracked changes in Microsoft Word.

We were wrong. Dead wrong.

Our "perfect" feature was about five years too early. Legal teams weren't ready to abandon Word. They wanted Word add-ons, not a revolution. We'd built a Ferrari for people who still preferred horses.

That painful lesson taught me something crucial: the myth of the perfect launch is exactly that—a myth. And clinging to it will kill your startup faster than running out of money.

What matters more is momentum—getting something useful into users' hands, learning fast, and adjusting even faster. Every day you delay chasing perfect is a day you're not getting feedback, not earning trust, not building traction.

Ironically, what felt like our biggest failure became our greatest asset. Once we scrapped perfection and listened more, we found what people really wanted. Not a new paradigm. Just a bridge from the old one. That’s how we finally started winning.

The Danger of Perfection

Here's what I've learned after a decade of building Concord: if you wait until your product is "perfect," you've already lost. The market doesn't care about your beautiful code or your elegant architecture. It cares about whether you solve their problem today, even if imperfectly.

I see founders make this mistake constantly. They spend months—sometimes years—building in stealth mode, adding feature after feature, polishing every pixel. Then they launch to... crickets. Why? Because they built what they thought customers wanted, not what customers actually needed.

The truth is, perfection is the enemy of learning. Every day you spend polishing features in isolation is a day you're not learning from real users. And in the startup world, learning speed is everything.

Starting Small Is Starting Smart

When we advise new Concord customers on implementation, I always tell them the same thing: start small. Pick one category of contracts—maybe just your sales agreements or vendor contracts. Get that working. Learn from it. Then expand.

The same principle applies to product development. You don't need to automate everything from day one. In fact, trying to do so is usually a disaster. As I often say, "The big revolution where overnight you have all your contracts automated everywhere typically doesn't work very well because it's a learning process for an organization."

This isn't about being lazy or cutting corners. It's about recognizing that you don't actually know what perfect looks like until you've seen how real users interact with your product. Your assumptions, no matter how well-researched, are still just assumptions.

The Art of Subtraction

Here's something that might surprise you: 80% of my job as CEO today involves removing things. Features, processes, complexity—I'm constantly asking our team to cut, simplify, and streamline.

My developers laugh because I used to be the guy demanding "just 10 more lines of code" to add another feature. Now I'm the one killing features we've already built. We once had enterprise features that less than 1% of our customers used, but they added complexity for everyone. We removed them, and our customer satisfaction went up.

This is what I mean when I say you don't invent simplicity—you craft it. Apple didn't nail the iPhone interface on day one. They're on iOS version 18 now, still iterating, still simplifying. Each version is a little better because they ship, learn, and refine.

The 5-Year Question

When our product team presents new features, I always ask them one question: "Do you really think we're still going to do this in five years?"

If the answer is no, we need to think carefully about whether to build it at all. But here's the key—we don't just abandon the idea. We break it down into smaller steps. What's the simplest version that could validate our hypothesis? What could we ship next week that would teach us something?

Take AI in contract management reporting, for example. In five years, I don't think anyone will manually build reports by selecting contracts one by one. You'll just ask your system a question and it will generate the report for you. But we can't jump straight to that future. Instead, we're taking incremental steps—first automating simple reports, then adding natural language queries for specific use cases, learning at each stage what actually works for our users.

The Real MVP Mindset

Everyone talks about MVPs—Minimum Viable Products. But I think most people misunderstand what "viable" means. It doesn't mean "barely functional." It means having just enough to start the learning process.

When we help SMBs implement legal operations software, we don't start with every bell and whistle. We start with their biggest pain point—maybe it's contract visibility, maybe it's approval workflows. We solve that one thing well, and then we build from there.

The same philosophy applies to product development. Your first version doesn't need to be your final vision. It just needs to be good enough to start the conversation with your market.

Learning from Our Mistakes

That collaborative editing feature we launched with? We eventually had to build Word integration anyway. But here's the thing—we didn't abandon our vision. We just learned to introduce it gradually. Today, many of our customers use our online editor exclusively. We were right about the destination; we were just wrong about the journey.

If we'd shipped a simpler version first—maybe just basic contract templates with Word export—we would have learned this lesson much faster and cheaper. We could have introduced online editing later, when the market was ready, informed by actual user behavior rather than our assumptions.

The Courage to Ship

Shipping at 70% complete takes courage. Your inner perfectionist will scream. Your competitors might mock your feature gaps. Some customers will complain about what's missing.

But here's what I've learned: the customers who complain are actually doing you a favor. They're telling you exactly what to build next. The dangerous customers are the ones who try your perfect product and leave without saying a word.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's founder, once said, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I'd modify that slightly: if you're not a little nervous about what you're missing, you've probably built too much.

The Path Forward

Today, Concord serves over 1,500 companies profitably. We got here not by launching with perfection, but by launching with purpose and iterating relentlessly. Every feature in our platform has been shaped by thousands of real customer interactions, not by what we thought would be perfect in a conference room.

For founders reading this, here's my challenge: What are you building right now that you could ship next week at 70% complete? What assumptions could you test with real customers instead of debating in meetings? What features could you remove and actually make your product better?

The myth of the perfect launch is seductive. It feels safe to stay in development, adding just one more feature, fixing just one more bug. But every day you wait is a day your competitors are learning from real customers.

Ship it. Learn from it. Make it better. Repeat.

That's not a compromise—that's the path to building something customers actually want. And isn't that more valuable than perfection?

Matt Lhoumeau is the co-founder and CEO of Concord, a contract management platform used by over 1,500 companies worldwide. Before founding Concord, Matt worked with Nicholas Sarkozy during the 2007 French presidential campaign and later for a major telecom company, where his frustration with manual contract management inspired him to transform how businesses handle agreements.