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
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.