How to Build a Product Nobody Wants

Building a startup is hard. But building one that fails? That's a craft. After watching enough of these up close — and personally executing a few — I've distilled the process into a repeatable system. Follow it closely and you, too, can spend eighteen months building something the world greets with total silence.

1. Fall in love with the idea. The second you think of it, convince yourself it's brilliant. Do not ask anyone whether they'd pay for it — questions only corrode confidence. The less validation you have, the more certain you should become. Certainty is a fine substitute for evidence, and it's free.

2. Never speak to a customer. Customers are unpredictable. They want things you didn't build and don't want things you did. Talking to them introduces reality, and reality has never once shipped a feature. Stay in the safety of your own head, where every user loves everything and the roadmap is undefeated.

3. Read "no competitors" as a good sign. If nobody else is doing this, it's because you're a visionary — not because ten people tried it and discovered there was no money in it. An empty market is empty for inspiring reasons only. Do not investigate which reasons.

4. Build the whole thing before selling any of it. Selling is uncomfortable. Building is cozy. So build. Add the dashboard. Add the settings page nobody will open. Add dark mode. Launch day is the ideal moment to find out whether anyone wanted this — that way the disappointment is efficient and arrives all at once.

5. Mistake politeness for demand. When you show a friend the demo and they say "oh nice, cool," write that down as a signed contract. "Cool" means revenue. "I'd totally use that" means recurring revenue. Never ask the follow-up — "would you pay for it?" — because the answer might force you to change something.

6. Treat feedback as a personal attack. Anyone who pokes a hole in the idea is a hater who doesn't get the vision. The people asking hard questions early are just jealous of success you haven't had yet. Surround yourself with encouragement. Data is only negativity in a spreadsheet.

7. Skip the market study. Market research is for consultants, MBAs, and people with less passion than you. Who has time to check the size of the market, what people already pay to solve the problem, or whether the demand exists at all? You've got a hunch. A hunch has never been wrong — except every single time.

Here's the thing. Every rule above is one I've followed. Not as a joke — as a founder, at 1 a.m., completely convinced.

The reason this advice feels so good is that it protects the one thing you care about most in the early days: the idea. Validation feels like putting the idea at risk, so you avoid it. And you keep avoiding it right up until the market validates it for you — for free, brutally, after you've already spent the money and the year.

The unglamorous truth is that the founders who make it aren't the ones most in love with their idea. They're the ones who fell out of love fast enough to see it clearly. They talked to twenty people before writing a line of code. They found out what the market already pays for the problem. They checked whether the demand was real before betting a year of their life on it.

That's the entire game: get to reality before reality gets to you.

I care about this because I kept watching people skip that step — and kept skipping it myself. So I built Evaltrum, a tool that generates investor-ready market studies and business plans, largely so that "I didn't have time to check if the market was real" stops being a valid excuse.

But you don't need my product to do the important part. You need one uncomfortable conversation with a stranger who actually has the problem you think you're solving. Have it this week — before the dashboard, before dark mode.

Fall in love with the problem. Stay suspicious of the idea.