Ashwin Upadhyaya’s Blog

Run a marathon. You may finish in, lets say x minutes. Now try improving that time by 5 minutes in the next marathon. An enormous amount of effort goes into achieving that much extra. Another example, consider train or bus travel costs. In the place I live, Volvo buses travel about 20% faster as compared to normal air-conditioned buses. Yet they cost almost twice as much!

Making a product which is ‘pretty good’ is easy as compared to taking that product to the next level. Startups always have this problem; Whether to make a ‘pretty good’ product or to make an outstanding product. 10% improvement in quality implies 50% increase in cost. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the cost of producing each product is higher. In some cases, it just means that a higher initial investment is needed; Maybe to put a more efficient assembly line in place.

Low cost and high quality are two things that are extremely difficult to attain at the same time. So, when bootstrapping a business, it is better to make a choice beforehand.