Chapter 6: The Momentum Engine — Ship

Picking is a decision. Shipping is proof. Until you ship, everything else is theory. Ideas stay safe in your head. Boards and docs feel organized. None of that creates momentum. Momentum arrives the moment someone outside your brain can touch your work.

Why Ship Matters

Shipping isn’t about polish. It’s about forcing reality to collide with your idea. Without shipping, you can’t ask real users. Without users, you can’t measure anything. Without data, you can’t share a story that resonates. Ship is the bridge between dreaming and learning.

Day 1 Indie10k

After I picked “growth coach,” I didn’t design a brand system, architect microservices, or perfect onboarding. I grabbed a Next.js boilerplate, pushed to Vercel on commit one, wrote a landing page with a headline and fake login, and hit deploy. It wasn’t pretty or scalable. It was alive. Alive beats perfect every time. Day two, the fake login became a simple form that emailed me so I could reply manually—messy, fast, and good enough to learn.

Ship Fast Without Hating It

Define a one‑sentence deliverable: “A page where people can sign up and see a dashboard with one fake number.” Kill scope aggressively. If it feels like an MVP, cut it in half. Then cut it again. Timebox shipping to seven days max—ideally one to three. The longer you take, the more you’ll over‑engineer. Automate nothing. If you can fake it behind the scenes, do it. Manual is allowed (and encouraged) in your first loop. A fake door (button that says “coming soon”) is better than a month of backend work.

Pitfalls to Avoid

“Just one more feature” turns a deadline into a checklist. Polish addiction keeps you in CSS while users wait. Secret shipping skips the whole loop; if you build for months in stealth, you lose the only feedback that matters.

Micro‑Exercise

Take your picked idea. Write: “What’s the smallest thing I can put online that proves this exists?” Give yourself forty‑eight hours to launch it—ugly, incomplete, even embarrassing.

If you don’t ship, you’re not in the loop.

Scope Boxes for Different Products

SaaS: a landing page, a signup form, and one screen with one fake metric. Mobile: a tappable prototype with one flow and TestFlight or APK link. Content product: a one‑page guide and an email capture. Service: a Calendly link and a two‑paragraph offer. If you can show it or schedule it, you can ship it.

When You Get Blocked

Shrink the deliverable until no part depends on a complex decision. Replace integrations with screenshots or Looms. Replace database writes with a Google Form. Replace auth with a single‑use link. If a task takes more than a day, you’re solving two problems—cut one.