... immediately. "No user research cited. No support ticket volume. No search volume in your category. This is a solution looking for a problem. What signal are you acting on?" We went back through our internal docs. Zero customer interviews. Zero mentions in support tickets over 12 months. Zero search volume in our own analytics. The feature was in the roadmap because a senior engineer thought it would be "elegant." We had been three weeks into development. Failure point ... ... evidence customers are asking for this. Without these, this is a cost center disguised as a feature." We pulled our customer call transcripts from the past six months. 147 calls. Not one mention of Platform X. We pulled our competitor

... building regardless. The next few weeks were chaotic. My wife had surgery, my grandmother passed away, and I had a factory visit to Asia I couldn t put off. Of course, that s when we got the interview request. Still smelling of flux and sweat after fourteen hours on a Shenzhen assembly line and then a midnight flight, I reached my Beijing hotel 10 minutes before the scheduled YC interview