Author: Imran
Translation: Jiahuan, ChainCatcher
Sitting in front of your computer, an entrepreneurial idea sparks. You see Cursor selling for $600 billion to Elon Musk. Perhaps the idols of the previous generation were Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel. You look at these founders and can't help but compare yourself to them. They don't seem much smarter than you. Their resumes aren't much more impressive than yours.
So you naturally ask yourself: Why can't I do the same? This is where most founders begin their journey. But this is also where most founders get stuck.
They see AI. They see crypto. They see thousands of startups that have already raised funding. Every space seems crowded. Every obvious idea has already been implemented.
They conclude: opportunity has run dry.
So they close their laptop, give up, and walk away.
This is how a huge portion of startups die in the womb. Not because the founders weren't capable, but because they thought the game was over before it even started.
Let's take Cursor as an example. Not every path is a direct and smooth one.
As early as 2022, Cursor began the "eating glass" grind. This was before ChatGPT existed. There was no ready-made playbook. No obvious market. Just a belief that AI would fundamentally transform knowledge work.
To stay grounded, they focused on three things. First, they picked a space they were genuinely excited about: AI. Second, they were their own customer. Third, they focused relentlessly on power users.
Because if you can win the power users, the rest becomes easy. Honestly, this story is not unique to Cursor.
Stripe started when online payments seemed solved, but the founders believed developers would increasingly become decision-makers inside companies, and whoever won developers would eventually win the internet. They had experienced the pain point themselves. While PayPal had proven online payments could work, Stripe saw the opportunity to build a "developer-first" version of that future.
Figma spent years building before the market was ready because they believed the future of design wasn't about better single-player design tools, but about everyone working together in the same file. Google Docs had shown the power of real-time collaboration for documents. Figma extended that insight to design.
Shopify started just to sell snowboards online because the founders believed millions of small businesses wanted to own their customers, their brand, and their destiny, rather than depend on big platforms. Amazon had proven centralized e-commerce worked. Shopify bet entrepreneurs would eventually want to be in the driver's seat.
Different products. Same pattern.
Each founder started with a non-consensus belief about where the world was headed, then spent years quietly building before that future became obvious to everyone. Their luck was catching a strong tailwind.
For Stripe, it was the conviction that more and more commerce would move online. For Figma, it was the belief that software would be cloud-first and collaborative by default. For Shopify, it was the hope that the internet would empower millions of entrepreneurs to build independent businesses.
Cursor followed a similar trajectory. The company was built on the belief that AI would fundamentally reshape knowledge work, and that software engineers would be the first power users to adopt it. The product feels obvious today, but when they started, there was no clear roadmap. Just belief.
Different products. Different markets. Same underlying logic.
Identify a long-term trend shift early, find the entry point others missed, spend years executing before the rest of the market catches up. Where there is Yang, there must be Yin. PayPal gave birth to Stripe. Adobe gave birth to Figma. Amazon gave birth to Shopify.
The first-generation product proved the market exists. The second generation rebuilds it around a new insight, new technology, or changing customer behavior. For founders, the important question is figuring out where you are in the cycle. If you're early, like Coinbase or Cursor, your opportunity is usually about making new technology practically useful for power users.
Coinbase didn't invent cryptocurrency. It just made buying and holding Bitcoin infinitely easier than managing your own wallet or wiring money to Mt. Gox.
Cursor didn't invent AI programming. It just realized autocomplete wasn't the endgame, and developers truly wanted an AI-native way of building software.
But if you're entering in the mid-to-late stages of a technological change, the opportunity often looks different. Infrastructure exists. The market is proven. Your job isn't to prove the technology works, but to find the 'yin' to the existing 'yang' — the blind spot the first players missed. Many of the greatest companies are born here.
Now you've identified your place in the technological change. You have a few ideas and are ready to get started, but then you realize something unsettling: you don't actually have many unique insights. You don't have a deep understanding of the market, the customers, or even the product. And that's perfectly normal.
This is when you must roll up your sleeves and start building your network, insights, and reputation. Thankfully, we live in an era where with X (Twitter), this is easier than ever. You can build an audience, meet customers, engage with power users, and learn directly from the people shaping the market.
The first thing I would do is use every product in the space. If you're starting a company in a category but aren't a power user of the leading products, it's hard to develop a unique perspective on where the market is headed. Map out every product in the ecosystem. Become a power user of each. Talk to people who love them, hate them, and have given up on them. Figure out why they stay, why they leave, and what they wish existed that doesn't.
You'll eventually discover that most markets aren't won because incumbents are stupid. They are displaced precisely because they became successful.
As companies grow, they naturally move further away from the individual user. Feedback cycles lengthen, edge needs are ignored, and a new generation of power users emerges that doesn't fit the existing product. This is where sharp founders spot the opportunity.
The goal isn't to think up an idea in isolation. The goal is to immerse yourself in the market until the missing piece becomes obvious. Once you do this long enough, you'll stop looking for ideas and start noticing them everywhere. This is the state you want to reach. You'll eventually find there are more opportunities than you could ever possibly pursue.
Next is the hard part: choosing one.
Once you've settled on an idea you believe is right, the next question is simple: Is this a 10x improvement, or a hair-on-fire pain point? If the answer is no, don't bother. People rarely switch products for marginal improvements. They switch when something is dramatically better, or when the pain is so severe it demands an immediate solution.
The easiest way to find hair-on-fire pain points is to look for people already hacking together workarounds. Spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, manual processes, copying data between systems — these are all signals.
The best founders look for pain, because when the pain is big enough, customers will rip the product out of your hands. And when the pain is trivial, no amount of marketing, growth hacking, or clever positioning will save you.
Now you've validated the idea, found the pain, and are building the MVP.
With Claude, Codex, and all the AI tools, building has never been easier. Ironically, this becomes its own trap.
I found myself adding features just because I could. The product slowly became a Frankenstein monster. Every feature made sense in isolation, but together they made the product worse.
Eventually I went back to first principles. The most important question isn't what feature I should build. It's why someone would abandon their existing tools to use yours.
Every great startup has an answer to this. Cursor could have built another coding plugin. Instead, they forked VS Code. Developers already loved this editor, knew how it worked, and had it embedded in their workflow.
Cursor didn't ask users to learn something completely new. It let them keep doing what they already loved, just with AI baked directly into the experience.
The best startups rarely force users to learn completely new behaviors. Instead, they find familiar workflows, remove friction, and make them dramatically better.
As founders, we obsess over what we're building. Customers care about what they have to give up. The lower the switching cost, the higher the value created, the faster the adoption. That's why the best MVPs aren't feature-rich. They're incredibly focused, giving customers a single, undeniable reason to switch.
By this point, you've found the pain, built the MVP, and hopefully given customers a strong reason to choose you. Next is the part most founders underestimate: distribution.
I've seen founders spend months on product and five minutes thinking about how users will find it. The truth is, distribution is often the moat.
Airbnb didn't win because it had a better website. The founders knocked on doors, personally photographed apartments, and manually seeded cities one by one. Stripe recruited developers one by one. Coinbase was in Bitcoin forums long before crypto went mainstream.
Cursor is another perfect example. Their team posted on Hacker News six times. Most posts sank without a trace. They DM'd thousands of developers, listened to feedback with extreme patience, and won users one by one.
Today everyone says Cursor's success was inevitable. But for years, they did unscalable, manual work.
Founders love talking about product-market fit, but before product-market fit, you have to solve distribution-market fit. Where do your customers spend time? Who do they trust? How do they discover new products? The best founders don't just build product. They build distribution engines. Because the market can't fall in love with a product it's never seen.
The final stage of all this is grit, resilience, and refusing to quit.
Sadly, I can't teach you this. No one can. It can only be learned through experience.
Cursor is again a perfect case. They spent years building before the market matured. They posted repeatedly, DM'd thousands of users, and were ignored by most. In hindsight, it all makes sense. At the time, the future was far from certain.
The same pattern is everywhere.
Airbnb's founders were repeatedly rejected and even resorted to selling cereal boxes to keep the company alive.
Nvidia faced near-death experiences multiple times before becoming one of the world's most valuable companies.
Rain, a company in our incubator batch, was born after the FTX collapse, when most thought crypto was dead. While others fled the industry, they kept building. Years later, they raised over $100 million at a $2 billion valuation.
The lesson isn't that these founders are smarter than you. It's that they stayed in the game long enough for their insights to compound.
So, I've laid out the whole framework for you.
Look for shifts in technology cycles. Cultivate unique insights. Obsess over your market. Talk to customers. Find hair-on-fire pain points. Build the simplest possible wedge. Win your distribution.
And most importantly, when it gets hard, absolutely do not quit.
That's it.
There's no secret. Most people can't do these things consistently, for a long period of time. The very few who do end up building the great companies that the next generation of founders study.
The world is yours.
Go build.
