The Startup Paceometer: Shipping Fast Isn't the Same as Getting There

We worship speed. Mostly because it's easy to measure.

And we all know the real question isn't how fast you're going – it's whether you're going somewhere that matters.

For years, something about the "move fast and break things" mantra hasn't felt right – and I couldn't quite put it into words.

On the surface, it looks like great advice:

• "Ship your MVP in a weekend."
• "Done is better than perfect."
• "If you're not embarrassed by v1, you launched too late."
• "Speed wins."

But beneath that surface, there's a gap between moving fast and making progress.

It wasn't one catastrophic failure that made me see it. It was hundreds of founders I've worked with – through Icanpreneur, through accelerators, through startup programs across Europe and the US – who did everything fast and still ended up nowhere.

And then I came across a concept from behavioral economics that made it all click.

The Paceometer

You know what a speedometer does. It shows you kilometers per hour. How fast you're going.

A paceometer flips the question: how long does it take you to cover a given distance?

Back in the 1970s, Swedish psychologist Ola Svenson discovered something counterintuitive: people systematically overestimate how much time they save by going faster. He called it the time-saving bias – and decades later, it still tricks us every day.

In 2013, Israeli behavioral scientists Eyal Peer and Eyal Gamliel took this further. They designed a tool called the paceometer – a speedometer that flips the question. Instead of showing how fast you're going, it shows how long it takes you to cover a given distance. Minutes per 10 kilometers instead of kilometers per hour.

More recently, Rory Sutherland – Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and one of the sharpest minds in behavioral economics – popularized the concept and made the implications impossible to ignore.

Here's why that matters.

If you're driving at 40 km/h and you speed up to 60, you save a massive amount of time. Real, meaningful progress per unit of effort.

But if you're already doing 110 and you push to 130? The time savings are almost zero. Maybe one minute. Maybe nothing.

Meanwhile:

• Risk of accident goes up exponentially
• Braking distance doubles
• Energy consumption spikes
• And your ETA? Barely moves

Anyone who's watched a GPS while speeding down the motorway knows this. You're running 3 minutes late. You push to 130. Five minutes later, you're still 2 minutes late.

The math doesn't lie. Past a certain point, going faster doesn't get you there sooner.

The Startup Ecosystem Has a Speedometer Addiction

Our ecosystem doesn't have political slogans on the wall. It has speed slogans.

They sound like:

• "How quickly can you get to market?"
• "What's your time to MVP?"
• "We built it in 3 weeks."
• "Ship, measure, iterate."
• "Speed is the only competitive advantage that matters."

And to be clear: sometimes speed genuinely matters.

But sometimes it's just the lowest-risk thing to celebrate. Because speed is visible. Speed is measurable. Speed looks impressive on a LinkedIn post.

You know what's not visible? Direction. Whether the thing you shipped solves a problem anyone actually has. Whether the road you're racing down leads to product-market fit or to a dead end.

Not because fast founders are reckless. Because incentives are what they are: the ecosystem rewards visible output, not validated progress.

Two Schools. One Destination. Very Different Arrival Times.

I've seen this pattern play out hundreds of times. Two types of founders, same ambition, completely different approach.

The Speedometer Founder optimizes for km/h:

• Builds before talking to customers
• Ships a product in 6 weeks
• Celebrates the launch
• Waits for traction
• Traction doesn't come
• Maybe does some customer interviews – but learns nothing from them
• Pivots
• Builds again – faster this time
• Still no signal
• 16 weeks gone. Runway burning. No closer to PMF.

The speedometer looked fantastic the whole time. 110, 120, 130. Impressive numbers. Wrong motorway.

The Paceometer Founder optimizes for distance-to-destination:

• Spends 3 weeks talking to potential customers
• Not to pitch. Not to sell. To listen.
• Finds the pattern: 7 out of 10 describe the same pain
• Builds a focused MVP in 4 weeks
• First revenue in week 8
• Every kilometer was a kilometer in the right direction

The speedometer? Looked modest. 40, maybe 60. Not impressive on a demo day stage.

But the paceometer? Arrival time: sooner. Cost: lower. Confidence: earned, not assumed.

What Genuinely Frustrates Me

The ecosystem celebrates the Speedometer Founder. The one who shipped in a weekend. The one with the "move fast" energy. The one who looks like they're winning because the speedometer says 130.

Nobody asks: "Where are you going?"

And here's the hypocrisy:

We say we want evidence-based startups. We say validation matters. We say customer discovery is essential.

But the moment a founder says "I'm spending 3 weeks on interviews before I build anything," people look at them like they're stalling.

"Just ship it and see what happens." "You're overthinking it." "Stop researching and start doing."

That's like telling someone who's checking the GPS that they should just drive faster. As if acceleration solves a navigation problem.

It doesn't. It never has.

The Exponential Cost Nobody Talks About

Remember the physics: at high speeds, marginal time savings flatline, but risks go up exponentially.

In startup terms:

• The faster you build without validation, the more expensive every wrong turn becomes
• You're not just wasting code – you're wasting positioning, messaging, team energy, investor runway
• And the one thing you can never recover: time

A founder who ships something nobody wants in 6 weeks hasn't saved 6 weeks. They've lost them. Plus the 4 weeks to realize it's not working. Plus 6 more to pivot. That's 16 weeks at 130 km/h on the wrong road.

Filtering for speed creates great demo days. Optimizing for direction creates great companies.

Why We Built Icanpreneur This Way

We built Icanpreneur to be a paceometer for founders. Not a speedometer.

Because we were tired of watching the same pattern repeat. Everyone tells founders: "Talk to customers." "Validate your idea." "Find your ICP." "Build your positioning." "Test your messaging."

But too often, founders are left alone with that advice – without a structured way to execute, learn, and cover actual distance toward PMF.

So we built a system that optimizes for direction first, then speed:

• Structured interviews that surface real patterns
• Buyer personas from evidence, not imagination
• Positioning from what customers said, not what you brainstormed
• Messaging that mirrors the language your buyers actually use
• Weekly progress toward a destination, not just weekly output

Less theatre of speed. More mechanism for progress.

The Question That Actually Matters

Next time you feel the pressure to "just ship faster" – and you will, because the whole ecosystem is engineered to make you feel like you're falling behind – stop and switch instruments.

Don't look at the speedometer. Look at the paceometer.

Don't ask: "How fast am I going?"

Ask: "At this speed and in this direction, how long until I arrive at product-market fit?"

If the answer is "I don't know" – you don't have a speed problem. You have a direction problem. And no amount of acceleration fixes that.

Because the world doesn't need more founders who ship fast. It needs more founders who arrive.

If you only optimize for speed, you don't optimize for success. You optimize for looking busy.