Right now the smartest, best-funded teams in the world are pointing the most powerful technology we have ever had at problems nobody asked them to solve.
That is the quiet crisis of this AI moment. Not that the models are weak. The models are extraordinary. The failure mode is aiming all that capability at things people never wanted in the first place.
I have watched this play out for thirty years, long before anyone slapped “AI” on a pitch deck. The pattern never changes. A team falls in love with what they can build and forgets to ask whether anyone wants it.
Capability becomes the goal.
The customer becomes an afterthought.
And a year later there is a beautiful product with no pulse.
Here is the contrarian part.
The most important job a founder has is not building. It is asking. Specifically, asking two questions over and over until it becomes reflexive: What do people actually want? And what are they willing to do to get it?
That second question is the one most teams skip, and it is the one that matters most. Wanting something is cheap. Everybody wants their dog to live longer, their commute to be shorter, their money to grow faster.
Desire tells you almost nothing. What people are willing to do is where the truth lives. Effort is the price of sincerity. When someone will change their behavior, spend their time, or part with their money to get a thing, that is when you know the demand is real and not just polite survey noise.
I learned this expensively. When I was building my first SaaS business in 2001, we did not win by out-engineering anyone. We won by filling gaps customers were already trying to solve on their own, and by watching what they were willing to work around when nothing good existed.
The demand was visible in their effort before it ever showed up in a contract. And this is the part founders do not want to hear.
The asking never stops. It feels like it should. You do your customer discovery, you find your fit, you build the thing, and you assume the question is answered. It is not. Markets move. People change.
What they wanted last year is table stakes this year. The founders who stay honest are the ones who keep asking after they think they already know, and who treat every answer as temporary.
It is so much easier at the very beginning, when you have nothing to defend and no ego invested in a roadmap. That is exactly why I love the earliest stage of a company.
The questions are pure because you have not yet fallen in love with an answer. The danger comes later, when the product exists and asking feels like doubting yourself. That is the moment to ask the hardest.
At PerkyPet, we are living this right now. We are standing up a validation cohort of more than a thousand pet parents, and everything we build gets tested against what they will actually do, not what they say in a vacuum.
One early signal stopped me cold. Eighty percent of pet parents told us they would log their dog or cat’s daily activity if doing so could add a year or more to their pet’s life.
Read that again with the two questions in mind. The want is obvious. Of course people want more years with their animals. But the survey measured the willingness. Eighty percent said they would do the work, day after day, for the payoff.
That is not desire. That is committed effort, which is the only kind of demand you can build a company on. It told us we were pointed at something people genuinely want, and it told us they would meet us halfway to get it.
That is the whole discipline in one number. Not “would this be nice,” but “would you show up for it.”The AI wave is going to produce staggering technology and a graveyard of products nobody missed.
The difference between the two will not be the quality of the models. It will be whether the founder kept asking the two questions long after it stopped feeling necessary. Build less until you know what people want. Then never stop checking whether you still do.
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Over the past weeks, I’ve been sharing lessons from three decades of building technology companies.
Four weeks ago, we uncovered why you need to hire rigorously, not sluggishly. Fire to protect your best people, not to punish your worst.
Three weeks ago, we took a look at what three weeks in a hospital room reinforced about my methodology.
Two weeks ago, why pet parent mental health belongs in the wellness conversation, and why we are building PerkyPet around it
And last week, what a hospital room, a happier cat, and thirty years of building companies taught me about showing up.
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