Ask any of our employees and every last one of them has heard me say, “Don’t build the church for Easter Sunday.” The idea is simple. Don’t design everything for the one perfect, crowded day. Don’t overbuild, over polish, or overthink trying to anticipate every possible scenario before anyone ever walks through the door.
And yet, that’s exactly what a lot of startups do. Engineers are, by nature, perfectionists. They convinced themselves that if we just add one more feature, fix one more edge case, or wait until it’s perfect, then we’ll be ready for the market. They spend months, sometimes years, building something they think the customer wants, only to find out the real need is something entirely different.
We were no different. When we started, we thought autonomy had to be flawless before it hit the field. We imagined every scenario, every corner case, every failure mode. But the truth is, it was all analysis-paralysis. The real learning didn’t happen in the lab – it happened in the dirt.
Our customers didn’t ask for perfection. They asked for something that worked well enough to start and then got better over time. They showed us what mattered, what didn’t, and where to focus next. We get a lot of our direction from our Farmer Advisory Board – a great group of forward-thinking farmers that tell us what we’re doing right and where we’re falling short.
Looking back, the goal was never to build the perfect system. It was to build something useful and let the market shape the rest. Turns out, you don’t need a cathedral to get started. You just need a door that opens.