Build less. Ask more.

Shipping got cheap. Knowing what to ship didn't.

That gap is where most startups quietly die — not in a dramatic failure, but in a slow accumulation of features nobody asked for, built by a founder who was working hard the entire time.

The tell

You can usually spot it in how a founder answers one question: who is this for?

A vague answer — "startups", "small businesses", "creators" — is not a marketing problem to be fixed later with better copy. It is the reason the product keeps growing sideways. A vague buyer produces vague problems, and vague problems produce a product that does six things adequately instead of one thing that someone will pay for.

What to do instead

Ten conversations. Structured, logged, and compared against what you believed before you started.

Not a survey. Not a poll. Not "would you use this?" — nobody knows what they would use. Ask what they did the last time the problem came up, what it cost them, and what they tried. Past behaviour is evidence. Future intent is politeness.

A weak offer gets weak feedback. A strong hypothesis gets feedback you can act on.

The uncomfortable part

Some of those conversations will tell you the thing you have been building for eight months is solving a problem people have learned to live with. That is not a failure of the conversation. That is the conversation doing its job, eight months later than it should have.

The founders who win are rarely the ones with the best idea. They are the ones with the best information, earliest.