Some products are genuinely useful and still fail commercially. The problem isn't quality — it's that utility without perceived scarcity doesn't command a price.
Useful isn’t the same as valuable. Or rather: useful doesn’t automatically translate into something people will pay for.
Automation tools with per-task pricing look cheap at the start. They're designed to. The costs come later, when you're dependent and volume has grown.
The most popular automation platform charges per task. That sounds reasonable until you build something that runs 50,000 tasks a month.
Asking people if they like your idea feels like research. It isn't. There's a hierarchy of signals, and most founders stop at the wrong level.
Asking someone if your idea is good practically begs them to lie.
Building a starter kit for an emerging tool and crossing $5K in three weeks isn't luck. It's a pattern. The tool gets the press; the template captures the revenue.
Someone built a starter kit for an open-source AI coding tool and crossed $5K in three weeks.
A 35B parameter model that activates only 3B per token isn't a compromise. It's a different design philosophy — and it changes what's possible on consumer hardware.
A 35 billion parameter model that activates 3 billion parameters per token sounds like a trick. It isn’t.
An investor told a founder their business wasn't venture scale. The founder agreed — and didn't care. That framing shift is worth examining.
An investor told a founder their business wasn’t venture scale. The founder agreed. Then they went home and kept running their profitable business.
The most viral developer tools aren't the most useful ones. They're the most enjoyable to encounter. There's a lesson in that.
The most viral developer tools aren’t the most useful ones.
Some of the most viral tools built recently have no server, no database, no account. Everything runs in the browser. The absence of infrastructure is the feature.
Some of the most-shared tools being built right now have no server.
The counterintuitive truth about narrowing your focus: everything gets faster, cheaper, and more referrable when you serve fewer types of people.
At some point, almost every person running a service business realizes they’re managing too many different problems at once.
A post published today is still bringing people to your product in eighteen months. A paid ad stops the moment the budget stops. The math is different.
The paid ad stops working the moment the budget does.