Cunningham's Law

You're seeing it when a deliberately imperfect prototype or beta release generates more detailed feedback than any survey ever did. Users who wouldn't fill out a form will spend twenty minutes explaining what's wrong.

You're seeing it when a proposed plan with a deliberate gap draws out expertise that a blank-page brainstorm never would. People correct more readily than they create from nothing.

Use the correction impulse strategically: ship early and imperfect to generate feedback, propose draft strategies to draw out team expertise, and post provocative takes to learn what the market actually thinks. Balance this with trust — be wrong on purpose sometimes, not by accident always.

Graham has built a career on writing provocative, sometimes deliberately simplified essays that draw out rigorous correction and debate. His writing isn't aimed at being definitively right — it's aimed at being specifically wrong enough to generate better thinking from the audience. Y Combinator itself embodies this: founders ship imperfect MVPs precisely to provoke the market into revealing what's actually needed. Founders can apply Cunningham's Law by shipping drafts (of products, strategies, ideas) that are good enough to be correctable but imperfect enough to trigger the correction reflex. The feedback is the product.