Go Slow to Go Fast (Enterprise Customer Discipline)
Perfect the product with a narrow customer cohort before chasing scale.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 85%
A counterintuitive enterprise software growth discipline learned from investor Chaithan Puttagunta: instead of adding new customers as fast as possible, deliberately choose your earliest customers with great care and then patiently keep building for that same small cohort well past the point that feels comfortable. Only once the product has matured for that group do you expand to new segments. The logic is that complex systems must evolve from working simple systems; airdropping a half-finished product onto a large new customer base creates a fragile, poorly-fit product that can't handle scale later.
Origin
Patrick learned this directly from Chaithan Puttagunta on Invest Like the Best and applied it, largely without pushback from his own instincts, to building OSAM's Canvas platform.
Core principles
- 01Complex systems must evolve from a working simple system, not be airdropped fully formed
- 02Serving a narrow cohort deeply produces a stronger product-market fit than chasing broad early adoption
- 03Discomfort with slow growth in the early stage is a signal you're doing it right, not wrong
- 04Premature scaling of an immature product creates fragility that is expensive to fix later
How to run it
- 1
Select an initial cohort carefully
Choose early customers who represent a clear, coherent use case rather than the broadest possible net.
- 2
Resist adding new customers too soon
Delay onboarding new customer segments until the product genuinely works well for the initial cohort.
Pro tip Track qualitative signals of product maturity (fewer edge-case failures, smoother workflows) rather than just growth metrics.
Watch out The instinct to go 'up and into the right' as fast as possible is natural but usually wrong at this stage.
- 3
Patiently iterate beyond your comfort zone
Keep refining the product with the same cohort even after it feels like enough time has been spent, until it is genuinely mature.
- 4
Let the system evolve incrementally
Build complexity in small, working increments rather than launching a fully complex system all at once.
Watch out A complex system airdropped without an evolutionary path from a simple one is likely to fail (per The Systems Bible).
- 5
Expand only once scale-ready
Open the product to new customer segments only after it can reliably handle broader, more varied demands.
In the wild
OSAM deliberately limited Canvas's early rollout to a small, carefully chosen cohort of advisors and iterated well beyond what felt comfortable before expanding to more clients.
→ Canvas launched with a mature, hardened product rather than a fragile MVP forced to scale prematurely.
Common mistakes
Chasing growth before maturity
Patrick admits his natural instinct was to grow customers as fast as possible, which would have created a fragile, poorly fit product.
Is it for you?
Best for
Enterprise software teams building complex, high-stakes products for a defined customer segment.
Not ideal for
Consumer products or markets where network effects require fast broad-based scale to establish a moat before competitors do.
From the transcript
“Chaithan Putagunta taught me that in enterprise software, you want to take what he calls the go slow to go fast approach of picking very…”
“we literally just Chaythan told us to do something and we just did it with with Canvas. So we didn't, I didn't question it.”
From the episode
Special: Invest Like the Best on Acquired