Seeing this pattern repeat with technical founders everywhere right now. Curious if it's just me or you're noticing it too:
AI tools made building insanely fast. A solo founder can ship a functional SaaS in a weekend. But the failure rate hasn't dropped -it's just that founders fail faster now. They build something technically solid, get to $2-3K MRR, and flatline. Not because the product is bad. Because the strategy never existed.
A founder I know had this exact problem. Clean codebase, good UX, reliable infrastructure. Six months in - barely any users, revenue stuck. He stopped building and spent a few weeks doing nothing but questioning his own assumptions. Three things changed everything:
he #1 reason startups build features nobody uses isn't lack of user research. It's lack of disagreement.
I've founded four companies. And the pattern that killed features -sometimes entire products was always the same. Not "we didn't talk to users." We did. The problem was that I filtered everything users said through what I already wanted to build. And there was nobody around me with a different lens to say "you're hearing what you want to hear."
Here's what I mean. A user says "I wish the dashboard was easier to use." A founder hears "redesign the dashboard." A CFO would hear "how much will a redesign cost vs. how many users are actually churning because of this?" A growth person would hear "is the dashboard even the retention lever, or is onboarding the real problem?" An ops person would ask "can we solve this with better documentation instead of a 3-week sprint?"
