The preparation trap
Homigo died without ever meeting a user. The autopsy says it drowned in research, and the flame went out before launch.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 34:46 (la autopsia de Homigo, con nombre propio)
- ↳ Seed 1-2: El miedo que congeló la app (el mismo proyecto, el primer miedo)
- ↳ Entry 2-1: You learn the way a neural net learns (el mismo principio de feedback, aplicado al mercado)
The app we mentioned on day zero has a name: Homigo, the platform connecting handymen with clients ▸ 34:46. In seed 1-2 we logged the legal fear that first froze it. This is the rest of the autopsy.
How it actually died
We spent two to three months investigating. We designed a system where users themselves would judge disputes, so we wouldn’t need customer service ▸ 34:53. Clever engineering, for a problem zero users had reported, because there were zero users. We researched, read, planned. And if you never put the idea in front of the market, you never find out if any of it was good ▸ 35:20. What actually happened is that after so much preparation, we lost the flame ▸ 35:32. The idea isn’t discarded. But it didn’t die of rejection. It died of delay.
se apagó la llama antes del launch →
The mechanism
The Lean Startup is full of our story wearing other people’s names: a game developer spending eight or nine months on features he feared the market would miss, only to hear “nice, but nobody cares about these” ▸ 25:51.
The reason shipping early works is the same fast-feedback principle from entry 2-1, pointed outward: market feedback trains your mental model, and a trained model generates better next ideas ▸ 26:38. Research without exposure never updates the model. You’re rehearsing in a room with no mirror.
Preparation feels like progress. But only contact with reality is.
The corollary we’re living now: this channel, this archive, everything shipped daily and small, is the anti-Homigo…