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Coinbase cofounder and CEO Brian Armstrong has one key piece of advice for founders still searching for product/market fit: take action. “If you’re pre-product/market fit, the best advice that I have from that period is: action produces information. Just keep doing stuff.”
Armstrong attributes this mindset partly to Paul Graham’s philosophy: “Startups are like sharks. If they stop swimming they die.” The idea is simple—momentum matters more than perfect planning.
“Even if you’re not sure what to do, just do anything,” says Armstrong. “Because when you do it, it’ll produce some information—people liked it, they didn’t, etc.” In the early days of Coinbase, he often preferred building and shipping quickly over debating ideas endlessly. “And there were a couple of times where the minute I shipped it, I knew we built it wrong. But I now had an idea of what to do next. And I only would’ve had that idea by actually going through the exercise of building it.”
Armstrong uses a vivid analogy to describe the entrepreneurial journey: “It’s like you’re at the base of a mountain that’s shrouded in fog. You’re looking up at the mountain and trying to figure out how to get up there, but you can only see three or four steps ahead because the fog is so thick. So you have to just take steps into the unknown. And when you take three steps, another three steps will be revealed ahead of you. And sometimes you’ll end up on some local maxima and have to retrace your steps… But most people in life don’t take the steps into the unknown because it’s scary.”
For Armstrong, the lesson is clear: progress comes from movement. You can’t think your way to product/market fit—you have to experiment, build, and learn through action.
