Perfection for entrepreneurs means simplification, not more work. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s wisdom shows how less can truly be more.

Perfection or pragmatism? As an entrepreneur, my immediate answer is always pragmatism.

It’s better to have a good solution in time than a perfect solution too late.

There is never enough time to get everything done you want.

We can’t comply with all the regulations or requirements promptly, so we will have to cut a few corners.

That’s what pragmatism looks like at Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded. But what about perfection?

It’s All About The Definition

Perfection is a word that is often defined implicitly. Most people interpret perfection as needing to do more work, add more features to their software, or write more legislation.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry defined perfection in a much better way in his book Terre des Hommes:

“Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.”

How much this resonates with my daily struggle as an entrepreneur. What can an entrepreneur do to move towards perfection, the Saint-Exupéry way?

In almost all cases, it means removing overdetermination in all aspects of a business.

Let’s look into some examples.

Streamline Your Product

Whenever we encounter problems with our software product, it is usually not because a feature is missing, but because features are too complex.

The more complex a feature is, the harder it is to test. It’s also difficult to explain to customers how that feature works. As a consequence, your customers will often scream that there are bugs when in fact the problems are down to complexity and configurability.

Let me give you an example. We recently cleaned up the application permissions in our software. Historically, there were 60 application permissions, allowing very individual configurations for access to different functionalities of our application. Misconfigurations by customers were so frequent that we decided to harmonize those 60 application permissions into just 10 permissions.

Looking at this mathematically, we reduced complexity by astronomical dimensions:

60 application permissions allow 60! = 8 x 10E81 possible configurations.

10 application permissions allow 10! = 4 x 10E6 possible configurations.

Therefore, we reduced complexity by a factor of 10E75. That’s a huge step towards Saint-Exupéry perfection.

Streamline Your Requirements

It’s the same on the business side. When we answer RFPs, we often see hundreds of non-functional requirements. Just like with application permissions in a software product, those non-functional requirements often contradict each other.

In some cases, those contradicting non-functional requirements lead to ugly discussions with the customer down the line. We even had a customer falsifying our RFP responses during the onboarding phase when they realized that some of the requirements contradicted each other.

Let’s reverse the perspective. We’re not just a supplier, we’re also a buyer. For example, we procure a whole range of software tools we need for our daily business. Whenever we evaluate a new tool, I constantly remind my team that we’re not that special, and we can very well live with the standard feature sets of Hubspot, JIRA, or Microsoft 365. Because the rest of the world can, too.

Streamline Your Internal Processes

This one is my favorite. Streamlining your internal processes is entirely in your control as an entrepreneur, and you can save big when getting this right.

Every time a colleague leaves us, we diligently think whether it is necessary to replace that person. Very often, inefficiencies are created by people who set up complicated processes. When they leave, it’s better to move your processes one step towards Saint-Exupéry perfection than replace the person who set up the complicated processes and allow the new colleague to further complicate processes.

Here is another example. I recently cleaned up all the JIRA tickets from the very early days of our company. Thousands of tickets described how we built the very first version of our software product. Most of them were ill-formulated and cluttered with countless labels. Deleting most of those old tickets didn’t just clean up JIRA, but triggered a discussion about making our bug ticket handling process more efficient.

Conclusion

Perfection in entrepreneurship is about doing more with less. And if you have to do more with less, there is no way around simplification and removing superfluous things.

If only lawyers would behave like entrepreneurs.