Siddharth's Blog

Iterate

You’re supposed to iterate.

It sounds too simple, almost mechanical, like turning a crank or refreshing a page. But it’s the only thing that works when you’re doing something new. Especially if you’re doing it alone, or without a map, or in a space that keeps changing as you try to move through it. There’s this idea that good plans, smart mentors, and enough market research will give you clarity. They won’t. They’ll just give you more sophisticated sounding ways to be confused.

Iteration is the antidote to pretending you know. It’s how people who actually build things, be it products, companies, art figure out what’s real. Not by deciding in advance, but by trying something, watching it wobble, and then making the next version less wobbly. It’s not glamorous. There’s no launch party for a slightly better version of a thing no one cared about the first time. But it’s the only path that leads anywhere real.

The problem is that we rarely see this path in the stories we consume. You mostly hear from the ones who made it. The people for whom something clicked. And because they’re the ones writing the threads and getting interviewed, you start to believe they figured it out from the start. They didn’t. But it looks like they did, because we’re staring at their highlight reel.

It’s hard to see the thousands of others, the ones who launched in public, posted every week, shipped small features, tried TikTok, tried cold DMs, joined communities, did everything right and still faded into silence. Not because they weren’t good. Not because they didn’t try. But because the world didn’t respond. Maybe the timing was off. Maybe the distribution channel collapsed. Maybe they were just unlucky. You won’t find them in your feed, because social media doesn’t surface people who stop posting. But they exist. A lot of them do. Survivorship bias is very real, and it is scary.

So when you’re in the middle of your own thing, and it feels like it’s not clicking, that’s not proof that it’s broken. It’s proof that you’re still in the process. That you’re doing what most people give up on too early. You’re iterating. That’s the real work.

People want certainty. They want strategies. They want to know: what works in 2025? Should I do SEO or TikTok? Should I build in public or build in silence? The truth is, nothing works until it does. Every channel, every tactic, every idea, somebody somewhere is making it work, and somebody somewhere is burning out trying it. The only way to find out which one is for you is to try them, a little bit at a time, and pay close attention to what creates even the smallest pull.

You might find your moment on some forgotten subreddit. You might sell your first hundred copies from a local newsletter in a small town you’ve never visited. It won’t look like the big shiny growth stories you see online, but it will be yours. The only way to find it is to explore. Not once. Not twice. Again and again.

And that’s where the popular advice starts to crumble.

Because if you’re looking for a clean, optimized, "smart" strategy that saves you from having to make all these little, awkward attempts, you’ll be waiting a long time. That’s where the whole “work smart, not hard” mantra falls apart. It sounds good. Everyone likes the idea of a clever shortcut. But the truth is, you can’t know what’s smart until after you’ve worked hard. Until you’ve made a bunch of guesses and watched how the world reacts. Smart is something you earn through trying. It’s not a shortcut, it’s a diagnosis you reach through experience.

People want to work smart to avoid looking foolish. They want to calculate instead of stumble. But stumbling is part of it. You don’t get to skip the part where you don’t know what you’re doing. You live in it for a while. You try to sell the thing. You tweak the landing page. You change the tagline. You realize the tagline was never the problem, it’s the product. Or maybe it’s not the product, it’s the audience. You only see this from the inside. The outsider version, the "I worked smart and nailed it" version, is a myth that’s told after the fact.

The irony is that once you’ve iterated enough, your actions start to look smart. They weren’t at the time. But in hindsight, they look like good decisions. That’s because iteration makes you smarter, not just about your product, but about the world you’re trying to serve. You stop guessing what people want and start knowing. You stop hoping for a break and start building systems that generate small, repeatable signals. But you only get there if you’re willing to be dumb for a while. Dumb and curious and persistent.

It’s not efficient. It’s not linear. It doesn’t photograph well. But the people who build things that last tend to have one thing in common, they kept trying when it didn’t make sense to. They didn’t treat silence as failure. They treated it as feedback. Not the kind they wanted, but the kind that taught them something anyway.

Iteration doesn’t promise success. It just promises that you won’t be stuck. That you’ll keep moving. And if you’re lucky, or patient, you might stumble into something that works. Something that catches. Something that only revealed itself because you were willing to keep asking, “What if I try this?” long after most people stopped asking anything at all.