What would you do if you were told the problem you are working on will NEVER make money?
"Data portability doesn't make money."
I heard this for years - from market leaders, from VCs, from people I respected.
"This is a regulatory problem, not a technical one." "This is a feature, not a product." "People don't pay for idealistic things."
<<Back story>>
In 2019, my team and I went deep into Self-Sovereign Identity: wrote research papers, ran experiments, and found ourselves at the intersection of data, identity, and web3. Right at that intersection lay data portability and sovereignty: the ability to own your data and take it anywhere on the internet.
This idea wouldn't let us go. No matter how hard we tried to move on, we kept coming back.
We pivoted through doubt, market pressure, and plenty of moments where the easier path was to drop the idea entirely. We thought about leaving this vision and building something else multiple times, but just couldn't. It felt like this problem mattered.
We went through multiple iterations: data plugs, smart profiles, open context layer. But the core conviction never changed: your digital data should be like a USB stick, pluggable into whichever platform you connect to, sharing only what you allow.
Because we believed the infrastructure question — who controls your context, and can you move it freely? — would eventually become impossible to ignore.
That moment is now. AI systems are eating every workflow, and context lock-in is the new data lock-in.
So we built AI Context Flow: the open context layer for AI systems.
Move from Claude to Gemini to Codex to OpenClaw to LMStudio to TypingMind to literally any website on the internet. Your context stays with you, reusable on every platform, and grows with you as you browse through the internet or from within AI Chats.
Proud of the path. Even prouder of staying on it. With a slightly deranged and obsessed team.
What's a conviction you held onto that the market eventually caught up to?
Replies
As someone building in SEO and AI, I've heard similar things about organic content: "SEO is dead," "AI will replace writers," "blogs don't matter anymore."
Yet every major AI system still relies on quality human created content and trusted sources.
Sometimes the market isn't wrong about timing, it's wrong about inevitability. Respect for sticking with a conviction long enough to see the landscape catch up.
Timing really is everything. The same idea that sounds impossible in 2019 becomes obvious in 2025. Glad you weathered the doubt.
I dont believe any type of problem can make money. Maybe the solution is too early or not the right one. But still you can make money out of any problem, you just treat it a/b testing until you find what buyers re willing to pay. In most cases you'll have to interview enough potential buyers to find out what exactly is the pain in their work and how to market and price your solution.
AI Context Flow
@hira_siddiqui1 You never know how many are whiling to pay until you actually get the money. For my experience many will say interesting, many will like, comment or whatever in social, some will try it also, but once you have the right problem solved they ask you for the price. But even then you dont know at scale if many will pay. The only way to know how many people are willing to pay is to build and sell something already existing in the market so you use them as reference, like is says tools etc. But then you have other problems coming
AI Context Flow
@vasileiost you are so right. Either you can be another product solving the same problem in a market or you can create the market.
The problem with creating your own market though is that you either go to the moon or go to zero - which is what a startup is anyways.
@hira_siddiqui1 Sure, but for this it all comes to timing, patience/time available and capital. Some times it's a slow painful process. Not for everyone and not always there is a market to be created/build.
AI Context Flow
Great story and I'm glad it worked out. How did you hold out for 7 years? I feel like I'm going to be in the same boat where I have a great product but not a great business. I'm not giving up on it because I believe in it and I'm going to change the world. reFrame will be synonymous with clarity and truth for human-to-human relationships the same way Google is to search.
The people who told me AI tools for everyday people "won't monetize" are the same people who think the only valid customers are tech-savvy early adopters. Most people just want someone to translate the tech into plain English. That's a massive market that's barely been touched.
I don’t know whether the problem isn’t lucrative or whether it’s because the market is too niche. The inventory management for Shopify sellers "just use spreadsheets" seems to be a frequent response to this idea, however. The thing that motivated me was an entirely different type of signal. No revenues here, but pain validation people were openly complaining on forums about their experience related to the problem and left angry reviews, and talked about losing sales due to lack of stock on hand, despite no evidence that they are willing to pay for it.
I’m launching today, actually. Yes, I’m currently at 0 users. I cannot claim that the market validated my idea yet, although my conviction that the problem exists remains unwavering. I think this is what you said motivates you when everything goes against you. The most interesting thing about your story is "the idea wouldn't let us go". You either suffer
from delusions or have caught some signal. The hardest thing about it is that you can rarely tell which one of the two it is before a long time passes by.