Why Solo Founders Should Build Ugly First

The Beautiful App That Nobody Uses

Early in my building journey, I spent weeks polishing a project before anyone had ever seen it. The design was clean. The animations were smooth. The color system was consistent. It looked like a real product from a real company.

Then I showed it to potential users. They didn't care about the animations. They had questions I hadn't considered. The feature I'd spent the most time perfecting was the one nobody wanted. And the thing they actually needed — a simple way to see which clients hadn't booked recently — wasn't even in my roadmap.

All that polish was wasted. Not because design doesn't matter — it absolutely does. But because I'd optimized for aesthetics before I'd validated the fundamentals. I'd built a beautiful answer to a question nobody was asking.

What "Ugly First" Actually Means

Building ugly doesn't mean building bad. It means building in the right order.

The right order is: function, then feedback, then form.

Function means the core thing works. If you're building a client tracker, can someone add a client and see their session history? If yes, that's enough to test with real people. The button doesn't need a hover state. The loading animation can be a spinner. The font can be whatever the framework defaults to.

Feedback means putting that functional but rough version in front of actual users and watching what happens. Not asking them what they think — watching what they do. Where do they tap first? What confuses them? What do they ask for that you didn't build?

Form means making it beautiful — but only after you know what "it" should be. Now your design decisions are informed by real behavior, not assumptions. You're polishing the thing people actually want, not the thing you imagined they'd want.

Planning as Procrastination

There's a cousin to the design trap, and it's even sneakier: planning.

I've caught myself spending entire days building Notion databases to track features, creating elaborate project roadmaps, researching competitor apps, building spreadsheets to model subscription revenue for an app with zero users. It felt productive. It felt necessary. It was neither.

Planning has a place. But for a solo founder with no users, the only plan that matters fits in one sentence: "Build the core feature. Get it in front of someone. Learn what's wrong."

Everything beyond that is a guess. And a beautiful, organized, color-coded guess is still a guess.

The market doesn't care about your Gantt chart. It cares whether your product solves a problem. The fastest way to find out is to ship something — even if it makes you a little embarrassed.

The Embarrassment Threshold

Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, has a famous line: "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

I used to think that was an exaggeration. It's not.

When I first put Seshi in front of testers, there were bugs. The loading screen took too long. Tags didn't work the way I expected. The subscription flow had configuration issues. It wasn't the polished experience I wanted to present.

But the testers didn't fixate on any of that. They saw the core idea — track your clients, see your revenue, know who's falling off — and immediately started telling me what they needed. One conversation gave me more useful direction than a month of solo building would have.

That feedback only happened because I shipped before it was "ready." If I'd waited until every edge case was handled and every screen was pixel-perfect, I'd still be building in isolation.

The Real Reason We Polish Too Early

Here's the part that's hard to admit: premature polish isn't about quality standards. It's about fear.

When the app looks beautiful, you can show it to people and feel safe. If they don't like it, you can tell yourself "well, the execution was good." The design becomes a shield between your idea and the market's judgment.

An ugly prototype offers no such protection. If someone looks at your rough, unpolished MVP and says "I don't get why I'd use this" — that feedback hits different. It's about the idea itself, not the presentation. And that's exactly the feedback you need most.

The founders who build successful products aren't the ones with the best first versions. They're the ones who got honest feedback earliest and had the courage to act on it.

A Practical Framework for Solo Builders

If you're building alone right now and you're not sure whether you're making progress or just staying busy, here's a simple test.

Ask yourself: "Could I put this in front of someone this week and learn something?"

If the answer is yes, stop building and start sharing. The feedback you get will be more valuable than anything you'd build in the next two weeks.

If the answer is no, ask: "What's the minimum I need to build before I can?" Then build only that. Nothing more.

For most products, the "minimum" is smaller than you think. A single screen that does one thing well is enough to start a conversation. A conversation is enough to start learning. Learning is the only thing that separates products that ship from products that stay on your hard drive.

Ship Ugly, Ship Often, Ship Forward

The products I'm most proud of aren't the ones that launched perfectly. They're the ones that launched at all.

Every version of Seshi that went to testers came back with a list of things to fix. Every round of feedback changed my priorities. The product today looks nothing like what I originally imagined — and it's better for it, because it was shaped by real people with real needs, not by my assumptions alone.

Build the thing. Make it work. Show someone. Listen. Improve. Repeat.

The beauty comes later. The learning has to come first.

Novus Broker Technology builds AI-powered tools for service professionals. We believe in shipping fast and iterating with real feedback. See what we're building.