Big Companies Have Bugs. You Are Not One of Them Yet

Founders sometimes defend a broken first experience with a familiar argument:

“Even the biggest products have bugs, and people still use them.”

That statement is true. The conclusion drawn from it is usually wrong.

Established products can survive some failures because they have protections a new product has not earned yet: trust, habit, history, embedded workflows, stored data, and switching costs.

A startup cannot borrow those protections simply by copying the mistakes of the companies that already have them.

One bad experience does not carry the same meaning everywhere

Imagine a restaurant you have loved for ten years.

You know the food is usually excellent. You recognize the staff. You have celebrated important moments there. Then, one evening, your meal arrives late.

You may complain, but you will probably return. That one bad evening is competing with ten years of good experiences.

Now imagine visiting a new restaurant for the first time. The meal arrives late, cold, and incomplete.

You have no history telling you this was unusual. You simply do not return.

A software product creates the same comparison.

When an established product fails once, a user may interpret it as an exception. When a new product fails during its core journey, the failure becomes the user’s definition of the product.

Retention does not always mean satisfaction

Trust is not the only reason people stay with an established platform.

Sometimes they remain even when they dislike the experience.

Their company data may already live there. Employees know how to use it. Important workflows and integrations depend on it. Replacing it would require migration, training, process changes, money, and time.

In other cases, no alternative provides enough value to justify leaving.

This is why retention can be misleading. A customer continuing to pay does not automatically prove that the customer is happy. It may only prove that continuing is currently less painful than switching.

Jira and Linear show what happens when the alternative becomes credible

Jira is a useful example because many organizations built years of projects, custom processes, integrations, and habits around it.

For some teams, that accumulated system became heavy. But dissatisfaction alone was not enough to make migration worthwhile.

Linear offers an alternative daily experience, together with ways to import or synchronize existing Jira work during a transition.

Once the alternative became valuable enough, the switching calculation changed.

Linear reports that Oscar Health moved more than 600 people from a highly complex Jira environment in just over a month. The important lesson is not that every Jira customer dislikes Jira, or that one tool is correct for every organization.

The lesson is that dependency protects an established product only until a better alternative makes leaving worth the cost.

What this means for a new product

A new product often has little history or embedded usage to weigh against a failed payment, lost information, or a broken main journey. Switching costs vary, but a founder should not assume users already have a reason to tolerate the failure.

This is especially serious when the journey involves money, privacy, security, access, or important data. One careless experience can damage trust in the entire brand, not only in the broken feature.

Dependable does not mean enormous or perfect

This argument is not a demand to build every feature before launch. It is also not a claim that software can be completely free of bugs.

A first version should remain focused.

Large companies can temporarily survive mistakes because of trust and dependency they have already built.

A new product cannot use those mistakes as permission to be careless before it has built either.