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Don’t Wait for Perfect—Launch, Learn, Grow
Published June 22, 2025 · 68 views on YouTube
How do you balance fast growth with maintaining quality?
Jacqueline Samira, co-founder of Howdy.com, says the key is not letting the pursuit of perfection slow you down once you have the basic infrastructure in place. Get your offering out the door, gather feedback as fast as possible, and iterate — waiting for things to be perfect just wastes time you could be using to get closer to the right product.
Why does asking for feedback matter so much?
Because customers who are unhappy usually will not tell you why — they simply walk away or stop using your product. Samira and her co-founder Frank actively ask friends, founders, and CTOs who chose not to work with Howdy for honest, sometimes uncomfortable feedback, since that information reveals real objections a typical customer interaction never surfaces.
What kind of feedback did Howdy get by asking directly?
By talking to a range of people who declined to use Howdy, Samira and Frank found two recurring themes behind the “no.” One example she cites: people said the website did not build enough trust to be shown to a board. That feedback pointed to a simple, fixable problem the team had never identified on their own.
When is it okay to slow down and get things right first?
Samira notes there was one period at Howdy when the team held off entirely — they were expanding into a foreign country and needed to set up a legal entity and bank accounts there first. That kind of physical, structural readiness came before they felt secure telling people the service was available. Once that infrastructure was in place, she says, don’t let anything else inhibit fast growth.
Full video transcript
When scaling a business, there’s often this tension between fast growth and then maintaining the quality. How do you manage this and balance this at Howdy?
I think that if you feel like you are ready — there was one time in our career, one time in the whole history of Howdy, where we were like nope, we are not offering this service to anyone. To give some background, we needed to have an entity set up in a foreign country. We needed bank accounts set up in a foreign country. We had a bunch of just physical things we had to do first before I felt ready and secure to be able to tell people I was doing this thing.
But after that, once we got all of the physical infrastructure in place and we were ready to take on more customers, or more clients as you call it, I think once you feel like you have some level of security for what it is that you’re offering, don’t ever inhibit fast growth. Like never. Because the faster you get feedback, the faster you can iterate, the closer to the ideal product or service you’re going to get without wasting a whole bunch of time.
Don’t wait for things to be perfect. Don’t wait. I know I said nail it — get everything that you know that you want to offer and get it out there and get feedback. And don’t be afraid to ask people for feedback. Actually, we’re still doing this to this day. Like Frank and I, at the beginning of this week, we have some really good friends who are founders of pretty successful companies, or CTOs at pretty successful companies, that don’t work with us. And we wanted to know why. Not because we’re like, you need to work with us, you have to work with us — it’s just, hey, you trust us, we’re good buddies, we hang out all the time — like, why don’t you use Howdy?
And I told him, I was like, please just be real with us, let us know why you don’t use Howdy. And all the folks we talked to, they gave us so much insightful information that a customer will not tell you. They’ll just walk away, or they just won’t use it. But in the early days, when you’re growing or you’re moving fast, you have the opportunity to ask for that kind of feedback. And that feedback is so valuable for growth, because they might say something like, “You know what, you’re awesome, everything’s awesome, but your website just doesn’t give me trust. I just don’t trust you.” Or, “I can’t show this to the board, my board’s going to laugh at me,” or who knows what it is that they’ll say — but you’ll notice a theme. And I talked to a bunch of different profiles, Frank talked to a bunch of different profiles, and they all had generally two themes that they both said for why they didn’t work with us. And it’s actually a pretty simple problem to fix that we’ve never thought to fix before.
And so get out there, go fast, break things. But if you’re going to do it, you have to ask for feedback, because that’s where you get the true insights.