What if you have a game-changing idea, but someone else gets there first?

That’s what happened to Shane Snow with one of his earlier startups. “It [was] essentially a very crude, rudimentary Pinterest, before Pinterest,” says Shane, founder of Contently and author of Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success. “Looking at the success of Pinterest, it feels like I missed a huge opportunity.”

And it was all because Shane tinkered around, instead of revving up and launching. “This was my project for a couple of years,” he says. “I spent so much time putting everything that I had into this, and being so nervous about what would happen if people saw it. By the time I launched it, it wasn’t what the market wanted, and there were other things like Pinterest that were coming out that were actually what the market wanted.”

Today Shane knows how to avoid that mistake. And that’s why he was able to successfully launch Contently, a company that hit eight figures in less than four years.

In his Mixergy course, Shane shows you how to accelerate your own success. Here are three highlights from the course.

1. Leap From the Tallest Mountain

Sometimes it makes sense to build from scratch, especially if the perfect solution doesn’t exist.

That was a problem Shane had when he was building Contently. “We had to screen the good writers, the professionals with real journalism expertise, from amateurs, or people who were just trying to make a quick buck on the Internet,” says Shane.

So he had writers gather their own writing clips and submit them. “There was all this work that either our users had to do or that we had to do,” he says. “So it was a big task, and what we wanted to do is to help them by saying, ‘Type in your name and we’ll slurp up your work from around the Internet,’ which is itself a standalone product.”

But the perfect product didn’t exist, and Shane estimated that building it could take two years. “That is actually a very hard thing to build,” he says. “You’re building a search engine, essentially.”

So what should you do when the perfect solution doesn’t exist?

Done is better than perfect

Build on existing platforms.

To do that, Shane looked for products that were similar to what he needed. “We can stand on top of the mountain that they’ve constructed,” he says. “We ended up hooking into the Google and Bing APIs.”

As a result, they started getting tons of new writing talent. “It turned out that this was the killer feature that got us thousands of writers,” he says. “People who were slow to sign up when it was this arduous process, they’d only add five clips, but when we did it automatically for them, suddenly people loved this experience. We had this viral growth start to happen.”

The solution wasn’t perfect, but Shane says that it didn’t need to be. “What we built in five days is 90% as good as it would have been if we’d spent two years on it,” he says. “There are still bugs and there are still problems, but done is better than perfect. It gives you the jumpstart to accelerated learning, which gives you much more time to refine, optimize, and get that extra 10% much more quickly.”

2. Kill Them Once and For All

In the startup world, you often hear “fail fast, fail often” and “test, test, test.”

The only problem is that some founders have a tough time letting go. “When you aren’t willing to let go of what you have done before, it’s very hard to break the convention that is holding you back from breakthrough success,” says Shane.

Shane ran into this when he was testing his screening process for writers. He realized that he had a few “diamonds” in his writer user base, but most of the writers weren’t very good. “So we agonized over what should we do now to screen these writers and sift out the good ones,” he says.

So what do you do when something fails and you want to hang on to part of it?

Decide to trash it from the start

Build to throw away, and throw away as quickly as possible.

With Contently, Shane basically fired all of his users. “We realized that the easiest thing to do would be to delete everyone and make them re-sign up, rather than take the thing that was not working and try to mold them into something that was,” he says.

So he emailed users to say that beta was closed, and to sign up again later. “We ended up doing this two times, where the next version we built to throw away,” he says.

That’s because his number one goal was to learn. “We said we are going to learn in this one-month period,” says Shane. “We are going to learn more even more and we are going to figure out what’s wrong and what’s not. And then at the end of that we are going to delete that beta and we are going to throw it away.”

3. Go Big or Go Home

Some experts say to grow incrementally. That 10% every week is all it takes to make it big.

Shane doesn’t agree. “If we said, ‘How do we make our writer network 10% better?’ basically what it’d amount to is doing more of the same thing,” he says. “You have to work within the old paradigm. You have to use all your old machines, and your old tools, and your old technologies.”

For instance, when Shane started to hire journalists, Contently would get a 15% commission. But when he wanted to get Fortune 500 clients, he had to hire a salesperson, which cut into their margin. “When you look at the math, suddenly we need millions of stories being written in order to make a business that an investor’s possibly interested in, or that we’re possibly interested in,” says Shane.

So a “10% solution” might have been to take a bigger cut. “If we increased the rate to 30%, journalists would just go around us,” he says. “And we wanted to help these creative people do what they love and make more money.” Also, a 10% increase wasn’t enough. They needed more.

So if 10% isn’t enough, what should you do instead?

Think bigger

Figure out how to go 10 times bigger.

“At Contently, the 10x meeting is when we’ll sit down and we’ll pick a topic, like a theme in our business or a slice of our business and say, ‘For the sake of argument and debate, what if we had to make this 10 times better?’” he says. “What would we have to break? What product will we have to get rid of? Who do we have to hire? How much money would we need to spend?”

So to solve their profit margin problem, they thought about selling subscriptions to the tools they’d developed. “We had built some software features to help companies manage these journalists, to get them paid, to get assignments, story ideas…to make the process easier,” says Shane. And software would have a 100% margin.

To try it out, they ran a test. “We told people that these new features cost $1,300 dollars a month,” he says. “In one month, we’ll see if people buy it, and if not, we’ll throw away this pricing.”

As it turned out, they sold dozens of subscriptions in the first month, and today they have pricing plans that range from $3,500 to $50,000 per month. “This changed the game for our company,” he says. “And without it, we wouldn’t have had this huge growth that we’ve experienced now.”

Written by April Dykman.