Tight Aggressive
Selective aggressiveness is the dominant poker strategy. It means to play only few hands, but playing each one aggressively by betting and raising. But this is not a post about poker, it’s about building stuff.
Two years ago, I wanted to work on a weekend project with a couple of friends. The idea, inspired by our apartment-hunting woes, was to create a tool for apartment hunting. It would be map based, and offer some additional killer features over craigslist.
After going to through an intense brainstorming session, we settled on a minimally viable product, broke it down into features, and came up with a development schedule. As we were about to start coding, we thought it would be a good idea to make sure that “no one has done it yet”. Unfortunately, google did turn up a site that plotted craigslist apartment data over google maps. “aw… it has been done”. We quickly became discouraged, abandoned the idea, and ended up playing rockband that weekend.
Just to be clear, we had no idea how many users the site had, or whether it was even any good. For all we know it could have been some long abandoned hobby. Yet, we just gave up.
The dominant sign of a novice poker player is passivity. Beginners talk themselves into folding and calling over betting and raising due to lack of confidence and experience. Looking back, being scared and passive is exactly what caused us to run away at the mere sight of something that looked like competition. This episode of sheer sadness has haunted me to this day.
Since then I’ve come to realize that, just like in poker, selective aggressiveness works when building stuff. Aggression in this case means committing to an idea and not giving up when things or people get in the way. It means to face the inevitable competition, and working as hard as you can to succeed and win.
Just like poker, executing the right strategy makes the game more fun.
