The Real Problem Isn't How to Build-It's What to Build

I've been watching this shift happen in real time, and while it's created chaos in the startup world, it's also created the biggest opportunity for thoughtful entrepreneurs in decades.

Three years ago, building software required months of development, a technical co-founder, or a hefty budget. Today, tools like Claude Code, Lovable, and v0 can generate full applications in minutes (in theory, reality is a bit more complex but that's not the subject here). The barriers to building are gone-but that hasn't made entrepreneurship easier. It's made it infinitely harder. The good news? If you understand what's really happening, you can sidestep the madness entirely.

When Everyone Can Build, Nobody Knows What to Build

The app stores are drowning in products. Thousands of new apps launch daily, most downloaded by fewer than 100 people and forgotten within weeks. The SaaS landscape isn't much better-over 30,000 software products listed on directories, many solving identical problems in slightly different ways.

The brutal statistics: 90% of startups fail. Of those failures, 42% fail due to lack of market need, while only 6% fail from technical issues (source: CB Insights). In an era where building has never been easier, the primary cause of failure isn't execution-it's building things nobody wants.

At Khiliad, we see founders falling into this trap constantly. The democratisation of building tools has created a dangerous illusion: that technical capability equals market success. We're seeing a return of the "build it and they will come" fallacy, but supercharged by AI and no-code tools.

The problem runs deeper than most people realise. When building becomes trivial, the hard question shifts entirely: what's actually worth building? This fundamental change has caught most entrepreneurs off guard, because they're still operating with an old mental model where technical execution was the primary barrier to entry.

The Endless Pivot Trap

The ease of building has created another insidious problem: the endless pivot cycle. When you can prototype something in a weekend, it's tempting to try one idea, and if it doesn't get immediate traction, pivot to another, then another, then another.

I saw a post today on Reddit where someone commits to vibe-coding one SaaS every 30 days until they get one that generates money. My first question was, "How much time he is going to waste until he figures out something that makes sense?" Instead of looking at the world and finding one problem to solve, someone is prepared to waste months or years hoping to hit the jackpot. It reminds me of the old Wild West and gold digging.

Founders burn through ideas like ammunition, never spending enough time on proper market discovery for any of them. They mistake rapid experimentation for learning, but it's usually just sophisticated procrastination disguised as entrepreneurial hustle.

The real kicker? Each failed attempt reinforces the belief that they just need to find the "right" idea, rather than questioning whether they understand their market at all.

The Startup Product Validation Theatre Problem

There's now a whole cottage industry of "idea validation" that's basically sophisticated procrastination.

The pattern repeats everywhere:

• Tools scraping Reddit for complaints, treating upvotes as market demand
• Polls on X asking followers if they'd pay for product ideas
• AI analysing competitor reviews to find "market gaps"
• Over 70 AI tools claiming to validate startup ideas "instantly"

Most of these tools just scrape social media platforms and present the data as "market research." Founders spend weeks perfecting Product Hunt launches for products solving problems nobody has. They'll get 500 upvotes, feel validated, then wonder why nobody converts to paying customers.

The hard truth: Social media engagement has almost zero correlation with willingness to pay, especially for B2B products. People will upvote, comment, and share content about problems they're not willing to spend money solving.

Even if you build something genuinely useful, breaking through the noise has become exponentially harder. Customer acquisition costs have increased 50% over the past five years, while the number of products competing for attention has exploded. This creates a cruel paradox: the easier it becomes to build, the harder it becomes to be noticed.

The Desperate Search for Retroactive Validation

There's another pattern that's equally heartbreaking: founders who build something that potentially solves a real problem. Something they genuinely struggled with. But somehow, it doesn't work.

Then they turn to Reddit, posting detailed descriptions of their products, asking the community if they've wasted their time and effort. They're not really looking for feedback anymore. They're looking for validation that their months of work weren't meaningless.

These posts are tragic because the founder often had the right instincts initially. They solved their own problem. But somewhere between personal pain point and product market fit, something went wrong. Maybe they generalised too broadly. Maybe they solved their specific situation rather than the underlying job. Maybe they built for themselves instead of building for others with the same problem.

The Politeness Problem

Those "I built X, what do you think?" posts on Reddit reveal another layer of dysfunction. They typically attract:

• A handful of "yes-people" (who are probably equally lost)
• Polite comments (because nobody wants to crush someone's dreams)
• Silent scrolling from the majority thinking "not another task tracker, I've seen five this week"

Meanwhile, the rest of us scroll past thinking "not another note-taking app that does exactly what Notion already does." But we don't comment that. We just keep scrolling.

The founder gets a few encouraging responses, mistakes politeness for validation, and continues building something the market doesn't need. The silence from everyone else, which should be the real signal, goes completely unnoticed.

The Co-Founder Delusion

Another symptom of this dysfunction is the explosion of founders desperately seeking technical co-founders to build their "validated" ideas for free. These posts follow a predictable pattern: non-technical founder with zero market research claims to have the perfect solution and just needs someone to handle the "easy" technical work.

They'll promise equity in exchange for months of development work, often for ideas they've never properly validated beyond a few encouraging comments on social media. Meanwhile, they position themselves as the "visionary" who will handle strategy and marketing for a product that may solve no real problem.

The reverse happens too: technically capable people build something impressive, then desperately search for a "business co-founder" to handle sales and marketing for their solution in search of a problem.

Both scenarios typically end the same way: wasted time, resentment, and finger pointing when products fail to gain traction. The technical founder blames poor marketing. The business founder blames poor execution. Neither admits the real issue: they built something nobody wanted in the first place.

The fundamental flaw is assuming that having an idea (or having technical skills) is the hard part. Understanding what people will pay for is exponentially more difficult than building it.

How to Find Product-Market Fit: What Actually Works

The companies that succeed in this oversaturated landscape share one thing: they solve problems they deeply understand, for people they already have access to.

Superhuman didn't succeed because email was a new problem. They succeeded because they obsessed over specific users and conducted over 1,000 customer interviews before achieving product market fit. They started at 22% saying "very disappointed" if they couldn't use the product anymore, systematically segmented users, and built their roadmap based on actual usage patterns rather than feature requests.

Slack didn't emerge from market research about "team communication gaps." It emerged because founders were solving their own communication problems while building a game. They had intimate knowledge of the pain point because they lived it every day. When they realised their internal communication tool had higher adoption than their primary product, they pivoted to focus on what was actually working.

The pattern is consistent: successful founders aren't discovering problems through market research tools. They're building solutions to problems they already know intimately.

Back to Good Practices

At Khiliad, we use well established approaches rooted in design thinking and good product practices. Instead of starting with "what can we build?" we start with "what job needs doing, and why isn't anyone doing it well?"

Your job as an entrepreneur isn't to find problems for your solution. It's to convert problems into solutions.

This means discovery before development. We run workshops to understand user segments, map empathy and personas, then build value proposition maps. Only then do we scope what we call a Minimum Usable Product (MUP)-not just viable on paper, but actually usable by the people it's built for.

The most successful products we've worked on started with someone who had a specific problem, had tried existing solutions, and found them inadequate for specific, articulable reasons. They didn't start with someone who thought building software would be cool and went looking for problems to solve.

Your Next Step: Become a Problem Detective

Stop asking "Would you use my product?" Start asking "What's driving you crazy about how you currently do this?"

The difference is profound. The first question puts you in solution mode, begging for validation. The second puts you in discovery mode, uncovering reality.

Instead of solution-first questions:

• "I built an invoice generator, would you pay £29/month?"
• "Would you use an app that helps manage passwords better?"
• "Does this solve a real problem?"

Ask problem-first questions:

• "Freelancers, what's the most frustrating part of getting paid?"
• "When you're trying to log into accounts, what makes you want to throw your laptop out the window?"
• "When your team misses important information, what went wrong in the communication chain?"

Notice the pattern? You're not mentioning solutions. You're not describing features. You're asking about current reality, pain points, frustrations. What they're trying to achieve and what's getting in their way.

The Magic of Listening Without an Agenda

When you stop pitching and start genuinely listening, something magical happens. People stop giving polite, socially acceptable answers and start telling you about real problems.

They'll reveal the workarounds they've created. The manual processes they hate but tolerate. The solutions they've tried that almost worked but not quite. The outcomes they're desperately trying to achieve but can't quite reach.

This is where real opportunities live. Not in problems people complain about on social media, but in gaps between what they need to accomplish and what current solutions deliver.

Pick a specific group of people you understand. Not "small business owners" or "busy professionals," but "accountants who work with construction companies" or "marketing managers at SaaS startups with fewer than 50 employees."

Find them where they already gather. Listen to their conversations. Ask questions about their workflows, their challenges, their goals. Don't mention your ideas. Don't hint at solutions. Just listen.

Once you've uncovered a real, painful problem, that's when you scope a Minimum Usable Product-something people will actually use, not just say they might.

Need Help Getting Started?

If you're sitting on ideas or can see problems but don't know how to dig deeper and validate them properly, you don't have to figure this out alone.

Book a discovery workshop with us, and in just one day you'll know if your idea is worth building-or if it's time to pivot before you waste months of effort.

We'll help you identify user segments, map their real pain points, and understand what they're actually trying to achieve before you write a single line of code.

Because the biggest risk isn't building the wrong thing badly. It's building the wrong thing brilliantly.

Stop building products looking for problems. Start uncovering problems that need products.