Builders Fallacy
The Builder's Fallacy highlights the common misconception among technical founders regarding the time required to ship a product and achieve customer adoption. It emphasizes that the majority of the work lies beyond just coding, including customer engagement and support. To mitigate this fallacy, founders are encouraged to adopt a more comprehensive view of project timelines and resource allocation.
- ▪Technical founders often underestimate the time needed to ship a product and gain customer adoption.
- ▪The majority of the work involves customer engagement, feedback, and support rather than just coding.
- ▪Strategies to combat the Builder's Fallacy include visualizing the entire effort required for a project, not just the initial build.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Builder’s Fallacy March 2025 Technical founders frequently drastically underestimate the time it takes to ship a product, and have it adopted by customers. A famous example is: The root of this fallacy is that when an engineer estimates the amount of time it takes to ship a product, they are estimating: How long would it take to build this, assuming nothing goes majorly wrong, and with a bit of extra time for padding. There are two problems with this estimation: In large, complex technical project, many things go majorly wrong and these issues account for ~80% of all the time spent writing code. Building the initial product (as in writing the code) is only 5% of the work.
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