28. Wabi-Sabi Mindset for 0 to 1 Builders

How to embrace flaws, move fast, and build winning product.

The Cult of the Flawless Product

I remember the early days of my first startup, building a marketing automation tool. We envisioned a comprehensive suite: email marketing, website builders, landing pages, push notifications, even blog features. We poured weeks and months into perfecting every design pixel, crafting fancy UIs for complex automations. The pressure to deliver something flawless was immense.

I always remind myself of this quote:

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears - Rumi

As builders, we're often trapped in a relentless pursuit of perfection. We dream of launching products that are polished, bug-free, and universally adored from day one.

No one cared about our perfectly polished features. That experience was a harsh, but invaluable, lesson - our desire to build beautiful, complete things was at odds with the market's brutal reality, which rewards speed and learning above all else. The need for speed is amplified tenfold in the age of AI.

What do I do differently today?

Embrace the philosophy of Wabi-Sabi. It's the art of finding power in the imperfect, the incomplete, and the impermanent. It's about embracing the "good enough" to get to "great" faster. My second startup's MVP was a simple Google Form.

Wabi (侘): Simplicity and Scrappiness

The first pillar of Wabi-Sabi for builders is Wabi, which we can translate as "simplicity and scrappiness." It's about an almost brutal clarity of purpose. It's finding beauty in the purely functional aspect of something.

This means:

• Focusing on the single, core function that solves a real, urgent problem.

• Ruthlessly cutting everything else. If it doesn't directly serve that core function, it's a distraction, a delay, a potential source of bloat.

Think of the elegance of a simple script that does one thing perfectly, or a single-purpose tool that solves a specific pain point. This is the essence of Wabi. It's the mindset that led to my second startup's MVP being a Google Form – because it was the simplest, fastest path to validate a core idea.

Sabi (寂): The Beauty of Impermanence and Evolution

The second pillar is Sabi, which speaks to the beauty of impermanence and evolution. It's the acknowledgement that all things are in flux.

For a builder, Sabi means:

• Your V1 is not the final state. It’s a single moment in time. It's a snapshot of your understanding and capabilities at that precise point.

• The "flaws" and "bugs" are not failures. They are the record of your product’s interaction with the real world, the scars that tell a story of learning and adaptation.

I've had the privilege of building from 0 to 1 multiple times – with my startup(s), as an early employee, as a head of function, and even as a "startup within a startup." Across all those roles, the hardest thing has often been getting people to believe that speed matters more than almost anything else. You can recover from mistakes. What you can’t recover is time wasted standing still. As Rumi put it, “When you start walking on the path, the path appears.” That’s true for products too. The journey, with all its missteps and course corrections, is what ultimately makes it strong.

The Wabi-Sabi Mindset in the Age of AI

The Wabi-Sabi philosophy is becoming a survival imperative, especially in the age of Artificial Intelligence.

The principle here is clear: Don't try to sculpt a perfect masterpiece from a single block of marble. Start with a rough clay model. Get it into the hands of your audience, gather their reactions, and refine the form with every touch. You might even learn that people never really cared about the marble; all they wanted was a functional model that could stand on its own. The cost of building and deploying has plummeted, making learning and iterating in the wild more accessible and critical than ever before.

Perfection is a Trap

In the realm of AI, "perfect" is not always possible. The models are probabilistic, the outputs can be unpredictable, and the edge cases are infinite. Waiting for perfection means waiting forever.

The Wabi-Sabi Principle acknowledges this inherent imperfection: Your goal is not a flawless output. An 80% correct AI summary that saves a user an hour of work is infinitely better than a 99% correct one that never ships because you're stuck chasing that last percentage point. Embrace the "good enough" as your launchpad to real-world learning.

Your Product is a Conversation

A "perfect" product, meticulously crafted in isolation, often ends up being a monologue. The builder is telling the user what they need.

A Wabi-Sabi product is a conversation. You ship something incomplete, something that might have rough edges, and you ask, "Is this useful? What do you think?" The user’s response, the feedback, the "bugs" they encounter etc, is their side of the conversation. It's their input that guides your next iteration.

This continuous dialogue with your users, fueled by rapid iteration, is how truly great products are born. Of course, there are always exceptions to these rules, but for most builders in the AI age, speed and learning trump all.

Practical Framework: How to Build with Wabi-Sabi

So, how do you actually put the Wabi-Sabi mindset into practice? It requires concrete changes to your building process and mindset.

Here are five practical approaches:

1. The "One-Day" Test:

Before you start building any new feature or product, ask yourself: "What is the most valuable, most imperfect version of this we could build and ship in a single day?" It's a thought experiment designed to force you to identify the absolute core value. It strips away all the nice-to-haves and focuses on the essential, functional element that delivers immediate utility. If you can't define a "one-day" version, you're likely over-engineering.

2. The "Honest" Beta:

Launch with explicit imperfection. Instead of trying to hide flaws, embrace them as part of the journey. Use language that sets expectations and invites collaboration: "This is our first attempt. It might be slow. It might get things wrong. But we wanted you to have it now. Tell us how to make it better." This approach turns your early users into allies and co-creators, rather than critics. They become invested in the product's evolution, providing invaluable feedback that you wouldn't get from a perfectly polished, delayed launch. The key is to solve a problem that’s painful enough, so that people can give their time to be your partners.

3. The "Asymmetrical" Roadmap

A traditional, "perfect" roadmap aims for balance across all features and areas. A Wabi-Sabi roadmap is intentionally asymmetrical. It focuses all its energy on the one or two things that truly matter right now, and accepts that other areas will remain "imperfect" or underdeveloped for a period. This requires discipline and a willingness to say "not yet" to many good ideas. It ensures you're always delivering maximum impact where it counts most.

4. The "Kintsugi" Approach to Bugs

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold lacquer, highlighting the cracks as part of its history and beauty. Apply this to your product's "breaks." When a bug appears, don't just fix it and move on. Ask: "What does this 'crack' teach us about our users? About our assumptions? About our system?"

Each bug fixed with this mindset becomes a lesson learned, a system strengthened, and a testament to your product’s resilience.

When building teams to embrace this Wabi-Sabi approach, it's crucial to hire the right people. I've seen it multiple times: big shots from big brand-name companies fail miserably at a startup because they spend an awful lot of time talking about strategy and no execution.

5. Jump in

Did I tell you this is my favourite quote about building products? “As you start to walk on the way, the way appears”

Yes, now act that. When you are not clear about where you are going, just look at the immediate next step. Forget about bringing clarity to every single step you have to take. You should have a general understanding of your direction (vision) and the first step to take (first milestone). The future milestones will reveal themselves. Trust your gut, and the dots will connect.

Conclusion: The Unfinished Builder

In the age of AI, where change is the only constant, the most successful builders will not be the ones who avoid mistakes, but the ones who learn from them the fastest. The Wabi-Sabi builder understands that true mastery comes not from flawless execution but from embracing the unpredictable reality of creation.

So this week, embrace one Wabi-Sabi principle. Ship something unfinished. Launch an honest beta, setting clear expectations for its imperfections. Celebrate a "flaw" not as a failure, but as a learning moment that strengthens your product and your understanding.

Wabi-Sabi is not an excuse for sloppiness. It’s an approach for speed. It’s a mindset that frees you from the paralysis of perfection and allows you to do what you do best: build, learn, and build again.

---

If you found this useful, share it with a founder or a builder who might find this useful.

Thank you for reading.