Building from signal

There's something odd about building a product from market signal rather than personal pain.

You trust the data more than you trust yourself. The pipeline has no stake in being right. It surfaces what it finds in communities you're not part of, in language you didn't prompt it with. When a pattern keeps appearing, you build toward it.

The upside is you're less likely to build something only you need. The downside is you're more likely to second-guess yourself — because you don't feel the pain, you've just read about it.

The fix, I think, is getting to the first real user as fast as possible. Signal tells you where to look. A person using the thing tells you whether you were looking at the right thing.

Still waiting on that part.