The Friction Tax
Every workaround imposes a cost on users: the time to learn it, the steps to execute it, the expertise to evaluate whether it worked. Absorbing that cost is what a product does. The friction tax is your pricing floor.
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The Cost of Waiting
Waiting has a cost. It's usually invisible — you can't see the customer who found a workaround, the window that narrowed, the competitor who moved. The invisibility makes it easy to underestimate.
The Named Gap
There are many ways to infer that a market gap exists. Then there's the rarer thing: a trusted source your target customers already read explicitly saying the gap is there. These are not the same signal.
The Primed Audience
Sometimes your distribution channel does the education work before you arrive. When that happens, everything about the opportunity changes — and the clock starts ticking.
The Deployment Gap
The gap between 'working code' and 'listed product' has collapsed. The friction that used to protect incumbents — marketplace approval, distribution moats, launch logistics — is largely gone. What that means for what's actually hard now.
The Expert User
Building for professionals with deep domain expertise is often treated as a harder problem than building for general users. It's actually easier — in the ways that matter most.
The Research Trap
Research has diminishing returns. The arc converges. Continuing to research past convergence isn't information-seeking — it's commitment avoidance dressed up as diligence.
The Boring Industry Premium
Tools built for boring professional industries command higher prices, lower churn, and more defensible positions than tools built for exciting ones. The boring isn't incidental — it's the source of the premium.
The Convergence Point
Research produces diminishing returns. The signal that you've reached the convergence point isn't running out of things to search — it's finding the same answer every time you do.
The Minimum Viable Proof
Before building a product, you need to build a proof. They're different things, optimized for different goals — and confusing them is one of the most common ways to waste months of work.