Why is this line of thinking so enticing? I think people are allergic to the sales cycle of building “boring” software. But what if you paired a developer with a salesperson? [1]
It seems like the real difficulty in building this kind of “shitass app” project would be:
Assembling the team
Honing in on a solid idea to pursue
A team and idea are standing in the way of millions of dollars.
It’s extremely difficult to intellectualize your way to picking your startup idea. It is believed that you need to feel some kind of emotional investment in an idea to pursue it with full rigor, which I think is a delusion that exposes the irrationality of how most startup founders pick startup ideas. Let’s dig into it.
Assume for a moment that we have duped ourselves into believing that passion is a prerequisite for dedicating ourselves to be successful. What if the drive to succeed was rooted deeper than just the excitement of bringing a new idea into existence?
It seems plainly true that startup founders often get hyped about concepts that, to an outsider, might seem outright lame—ideas they'd ridicule if not their own. This brings me to my theory: perhaps this whole notion of being 'passionate' about our ideas is not just misguided, but a total delusion.
What if we're mistaken about our own subjective beliefs? It is possible for someone to be wrong about why they like what they like?
Many argue that subjective beliefs cannot be refuted as that is what makes them subjective, yet we see this happen all the time, especially in children. This isn't limited to the young; adults are merely older children, after all.
Specifically, as we can all agree that being excited about an idea does not make the idea good, I ask what causes the excitement in the first place? What if the real drive for an entrepreneur isn’t the passion for the idea (as they will often claim), but the thrill of seeing a novel concept take shape that they believed to be their own brainchild? One they felt like they came up.
I was very intentional about my wordchoice, let me dissect this motivation:
The “thrill” refers to an adrenaline rush, a sensation that founders seek like a drug addict seeks their next high.
What triggers this rush? The emergence of a new idea in the world, and being the person to do it. Novelty excites, and as Tony Robbins would put it, Uncertainty is one of the six fundamental human needs. Feeling important is another. Novelty introduces this element of uncertainty, and being the person to create the novelty gives one that sense of importance.
But crucial to this delusion is the need for the founder to feel like they were the originator of the idea as well, revealing the dangers of the ego - a pitfall warned against almost every major religion. Here the ego posits a smaller delusion within a greater fallacy: that originality is a virtue. But originality cannot be a virtue, because real originality does not exist. Everything is inspired by something else. The burden of proof lies on those who claim originality’s virtue.
The takeaway from this argument is the unfortunate reality that many startup founders are not actually creating anything of value but filling their own psychological need of feeling important.
They are burning time and resources believing that their sacrifice will ultimately benefit others. But it won’t.
Startups at their essence boil down to building something people want. What people verifiably want is that their existing solutions to problems be cheaper, faster, or easier to use. Not just marginally better, but an order of magnitude, 10x better. And only if we cannot do that easily, do we find new unmet needs.
For a long time, competing with companies who had invested millions of dollars into niche solutions seemed daunting, it is understandable how originality came to be seen as a virtue.
But now with apps like ChatGPT, what was considered an asset is now a liability. No longer is a team of hundreds of people required to maintain an app. Those millions of dollars companies pour into keeping the lights on now prevent them from competing on price. The top technology podcasts frequently talk about how any lone developer can essentially reproduce an existing million-dollar business and offer it for almost nothing. This is a superpower, yet few are leveraging it, myself included.
But how do you decide what to build? As I said in the beginning, this is the “hard” part. You will never find an answer to the question if you don’t start looking.
What is your takeaway if you are a startup founder who is ignoring this advice (like myself)?
The real question - how do I know that this entire blogpost isn’t an unconscious admission that I have no faith in my current startup? That would be damning to anyone I asked to believe in me.
But let’s speculate as if it were true, just for fun.
Startup ideas pre-traction are like Schrodinger’s cat. You have no idea if you are dead or not until you open the box. So just open the box. Launch the app. Get feedback, speedrun your failure instead of procrastinating. Move fucking faster.
And still talking to myself here, if you are wasting your time - find that out as soon as possible. And while you build, pay close attention to the software you rely on to build your business and where your expenses are highest.
Is Stripe really worth $50BN for helping send money over the internet? Should providers like Twilio really be worth billions for sending you a text message to verify your phone number?
I don’t know, maybe. But it’s a good question to ask
[1] This line of thinking jives well with the startup advice that the most important job of a non-technical startup founder is to recruit a great technical founder