How do you stay convinced you're right when the market signal is noisy?

When you're building for a problem the market hasn't fully named yet, how do you stay convinced you're right and not just stubborn?

Our thesis a year ago: a wave of EU regulation is coming, small companies won't handle it alone. On paper we were nearly alone in the space.

Reality was messier. Two releases, both flops. Wrong channels first, then trying to reach every persona at once, then over-promoting a brand we couldn't articulate simply. And LLMs got better at sounding confident about compliance answers, which for a stretch made us wonder if we were building the buggy whip. (They got better at sounding confident, not at being reliable. That's exactly the gap we still see.)

The space is now crowded, but the gap is still unclosed.

What kept you convinced you were right, and how much did staying close to real users do the work?