https://earthly.dev/blog/shutting-down-earthly-ci/
Features are not what makes you successful.
- You’ll never be more mature, or have more features, or more integrations than the incumbents.
- You can be 10x better in one, very specific way. And you’ll appeal to the few teams where the very specific problem you’re solving is so painful that they’re willing to make compromises on everything else.
- Then, once you have captured that segment, you invest more, extend to a wider audience, get more feedback, then again invest more, extend again, and so on.
- So if your MVP is not getting enough validation, you can’t just slap more features on it, because, again, features are not what will make you successful. Incumbents win feature contests.
Build the product incrementally.
Learning from mistakes of the past, at Earthly we built everything incrementally. And we even put products on the market that initially seemed like purely engineering intermediate milestones. Each product builds on top of the previous achievements, thus allowing for incremental iteration with the customer in mind. We’re now seeing our latest incremental iteration not working in the marketplace. And, knowing what I know about early products, it’s not the missing features that are the problem.
Fail fast.
There were some early signals that certain aspects of the product did not align with what the industry needs, but we didn’t listen. We just kept building.
My biggest regret from the experience was that we did not stop earlier when the signs were there.