If you walked into our Slack back then, you'd think we were crushing it.
New commits every day.
CI/CD pipelines green.
Feature flags rolling out weekly.
We were shipping.
And it felt amazing.
The only problem?
None of it mattered.
Because we weren't shipping to customers. We were shipping to ourselves.
The Illusion of Momentum
There's a special kind of dopamine that comes from seeing progress in GitHub.
It feels like traction: something's happening, things are improving, momentum is building.
But if no one's using it, that momentum is self-contained.
You're getting faster inside a bubble.
That was the "engagement gap": the widening distance between how fast we were building and how little the market cared.
We were measuring engineering speed instead of business traction.
When Productivity Becomes a Distraction
I'd look at our metrics and feel proud:
- ✅ New AI pipeline working.
- ✅ Magic link authentication polished.
- ✅ Celery workers optimized.
- ✅ Retention policy automated.
Everything humming.
And yet… zero conversations with actual operators that week.
It's wild how productive you can be while making zero business progress.
It's also incredibly comfortable, because activity feels like control, and control feels safe.
But safe doesn't sell.
What "Velocity" Really Means
Velocity only matters if it's pointed toward the right target.
If you're iterating in isolation, you're not accelerating. You're orbiting.
We weren't iterating toward users; we were iterating toward perfection.
Cleaner code, better architecture, fewer bugs: all things engineers love, but customers never see.
That's when it clicked: progress measured by commits is internal validation; progress measured by conversations is external validation.
Only one of those grows a business.
What I Learned
Code velocity can hide business stagnation. Fast doesn't mean forward.
The only metric that matters early on is engagement, not commits.
You can't refactor your way to product-market fit.
Progress that doesn't reach a customer is just motion.
Building fast felt like progress.
But the real progress was the uncomfortable stuff: the emails, the outreach, the demos that might go nowhere.
Velocity is easy.
Engagement is hard.
And if you're not careful, velocity becomes the prettiest way to avoid the real work.
Next in The Pivot Chronicles
Part 10: Starting Over (Again): What Would Change With 10 Real Customers
If I had 30 days to get 10 paying customers, I'd throw out 90% of what I've built. Here's what I'd do instead.