GoKawiilYou've worked your heart out building your startup. You’ve convinced the smartest investors to pour millions into your vision. You’ve recruited a dedicated, world-class team. Your conviction is immutable, and the timing couldn't be better to make your long-sought lasting dent in the world...
But Roey, the prospective customer who just listened to your demo, stares back at you blankly. “So,” he says, still chewing through his lunch, “you’re, like, a gateway thing? We already have something for that.”
“Goddammit,” you think as you let out a quiet sigh... Another person who doesn’t get it.
This is the kind of scenario I’ve been brought into at 100+ startups, including Temporal, Runlayer, Console, Restate, Pydantic, Rerun, Netlify, and Pinecone (where I helped create and popularize “vector databases”). And having worked on every version of the problem, at every stage, in every vertical, with every founder personality, and in every hype cycle of the past 13 years, I’ve found the most reliable solution is as simple as it is effective:
Say something people want.
This needs to be said and consciously practiced for the same reason Paul Graham’s simple advice to “make something people want” remains YC's motto 20 years later:
The smarter you are...
The stronger your conviction...
The bigger your ambition...
The bigger the gap between what you tend to say about your product and what people presently want. And until you bridge that gap, everything from selling to recruiting to fundraising... to getting people to give a damn... will keep feeling far more difficult than it needs to be.
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