This piece offers a clear answer to a worry that many aspiring founders share. In a reality where the world is already full of successful startups and every idea feels saturated, it uses concrete methodology and real examples to explain how you can still find opportunity and build a successful business. The piece emphasizes how important it is to read the flow of technological change, grasp customers' deep needs, and execute with persistence.

1. A Shaky Start: Where Are the Opportunities? 🤔

Many people look at successful founders like Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel — much as Cursor was sold to Elon for $60 billion — and compare themselves to them. The question naturally follows: "Those people don't even look noticeably smarter than me, and their résumés aren't better than mine, so why can't I do it?" This is where most founders begin, but it's also where they get discouraged. Countless startups have already raised funding in AI, crypto, and other fields; every area looks saturated, and it feels like all the obvious ideas have already been built. In the end, many conclude "there are no more opportunities," close the laptop, and move on.

"Every obvious idea has already been built. You conclude there are no more opportunities. And then you close the laptop and move on to the next thing. Countless startups die at exactly this point — not because the founders lacked ability, but because they thought the game was already over."

But that's not actually true. Take Cursor, for example. Back in 2022, before ChatGPT even existed, they were already struggling. At the time there was no set playbook for success and no clear market, only an unshakable belief that AI would fundamentally transform knowledge work. They focused on three things:

• First, they chose AI, a field they were genuinely interested in.
• Second, they became customers of their own product.
• Third, they relentlessly focused on power users. Once you win over power users, it becomes far easier to attract everyone else. And this story isn't unique to Cursor.

2. The Eye to Read the Tide 'Before Everyone Else' 🌊

Companies like Stripe, Figma, and Shopify are wildly successful now, but their beginnings were anything but easy.

• Stripe started at a time when online payments looked like an already-solved problem. But the founders believed that developers would increasingly become decision-makers inside companies, and that whoever won over developers would rule the internet. PayPal had already proven the potential of online payments, but Stripe saw an opportunity to build a new, developer-centric payment system.

• Figma poured years into development long before the market was ready. They believed the future of design wasn't a better design tool, but collaborative design where everyone works in the same file. Google Docs had shown the power of real-time collaboration, and Figma applied that insight to the design space.

• Shopify began as an attempt to sell snowboards online. The founders believed that millions of small business owners would want to own their own customers, brand, and destiny rather than depend on a marketplace. Amazon had proven the success of centralized e-commerce, but Shopify bet that entrepreneurs would ultimately want to own their businesses themselves.

All of these founders held a non-consensus belief about where the world was heading, and they built their products for years before that future became obvious to everyone else. They had the good fortune of being connected to powerful tailwinds:

• For Stripe: the belief that more commerce would move online.
• For Figma: the belief that software would become cloud-first and collaborative by default.
• For Shopify: the belief that the internet would give millions of entrepreneurs the power to build independent businesses.

Cursor walked a similar path. They built the company on the belief that AI would fundamentally transform knowledge work, and that software engineers would be the first power users to adopt the technology. Cursor's product may look obvious now, but when they started there was no clear manual and no path — only conviction.

All of these cases involve different products and different markets, yet they show the same pattern: spot a secular shift early, find the wedge others miss, and execute for years before other markets catch up.

3. The Path Pioneers Opened, the Opportunity for Followers 🗺️

Everything has its yin and yang. PayPal led to Stripe, Adobe led to Figma, Amazon led to Shopify. Once the first generation proves a market exists, the second generation reimagines that market based on new insight, new technology, or changing customer behavior.

The crucial question for founders is to figure out where they sit in this cycle of technological change. If you're at an early stage, like Coinbase or Cursor, the opportunity often lies in making the technology usable for power users. Coinbase didn't invent crypto, but it made buying and holding Bitcoin far easier. Cursor didn't invent AI coding, but it realized that developers wanted an AI-powered way to build software.

But if you're building a business in the mid or late stage of a technological shift, the opportunity looks different. The infrastructure is already built and the market is already proven. Your job isn't to prove the technology works, but to find the 'yin' to the existing 'yang' — that is, to find the missing insight that the first generation overlooked. Many great companies are born at exactly this point.

4. Gaining Insight: How to Immerse Yourself Deeply in the Market 🏊‍♀️

By now you've figured out where you stand in the technological shift, and you have a few ideas and are ready to start a business. But you may have to confront an uncomfortable truth: you lack insight. You may not have a deep understanding of the market, the customers, or even the product. But this is completely normal.

From here, you have to roll up your sleeves, build a network, gain insight, and earn a reputation. Fortunately, we live in the "post-X" era, so these things are 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 to do is try every product in the field. If you're building a business in a given category, you have to become a power user of the products that represent that field. Otherwise, it's hard to develop a unique insight into where the market is headed.

Examine every product in the ecosystem closely and become a power user of each one. Talk to the people who love the product, talk to the people who hate it, and talk to the people who switched to a different product. You need to understand why they stay, why they leave, and what they wish existed that doesn't yet.

In the end, you'll discover that most markets lose not because the incumbents are stupid, but because they became too successful. As a company grows, it drifts further and further from individual users. Feedback loops slow down, edge cases get ignored, and new power users emerge who don't fit the existing product. This is exactly the point where new founders find their opportunity.

The goal isn't to dream up an idea on your own. It's to immerse yourself so deeply in the market that the missing pieces become clearly visible. Do that long enough, and instead of hunting for ideas, you'll find ideas everywhere. This is the point you need to reach. Eventually you'll realize there are far more opportunities than you could ever build. Now the hardest step remains: choosing one of them.

5. Solving a Burning Problem: A 10x Improvement, or Desperate Pain? 🔥

Once you've found an idea you believe is right, the next question is simple: "Is this a 10x improvement, or does it solve a hair-on-fire problem?" If the answer is no, there's no need to start. People rarely switch for a slight improvement. They only move when something is dramatically better, or the pain is so severe they need a solution immediately.

The easiest way to find a hair-on-fire problem is to look for places where people are already building workarounds. Spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, manual processes, copying data between systems — these are all signals. The best founders look for the pain. If the pain is big enough, customers will snatch the product right out of your hands. If the pain is small, no amount of marketing, growth hacking, or clever positioning can save you. Now you've identified the idea and the pain, and you're building a minimum viable product (MVP).

6. The Power of Simplicity: Why Product Development and Distribution Matter 🛠️

Thanks to Claude, Codex, and AI tools, building a product is easier than ever. Ironically, this has become another trap. I myself kept adding features simply "because I could," until the product turned into a Frankenstein's monster. Each feature made sense on its own, but together they made the product worse.

In the end I went back to first principles. The most important question isn't "what features should I build?" It's "why would people abandon what they're using now and switch to our product?"

Every great startup has an answer to this question. Cursor could have built yet another coding plugin. Instead, they forked VS Code. Developers already loved VS Code, understood how it worked, and had built it into their daily workflow. Cursor didn't ask users to learn something entirely new. They asked users to keep doing what they already loved, but integrated AI directly into the experience to make it dramatically better.

The best startups almost never force users into entirely new behaviors. Instead, they find a familiar workflow, remove the friction, and improve it dramatically.

As founders, we obsess over what to build. But customers obsess over what they have to give up. The lower the switching cost and the higher the value created, the faster adoption happens. This is why the best MVPs aren't feature-rich; they're painfully focused on giving customers a compelling reason they have no choice but to switch.

By now you've identified the pain, built the MVP, and given customers a compelling reason to switch. Now comes the step most founders underestimate: distribution.

I see founders pour months into the product and then spend only five minutes thinking about how users will discover it. But the truth is that distribution often becomes the moat.

Airbnb didn't succeed because its website was better. The founders knocked on doors themselves, photographed apartments, and onboarded hosts city by city in person. Stripe recruited developers one by one. Coinbase practically lived on Bitcoin forums long before crypto went mainstream.

Cursor is another good example. The team posted on Hacker News six times. Most of those posts got no response at all. They DM'd thousands of developers, listened obsessively to feedback, and won users one at a time. Today everyone says Cursor's success was inevitable, but for years they did "things that didn't scale."

Founders love to talk about product-market fit, but before product-market fit there's distribution-market fit. Where do customers spend their time? Who do they trust? How do they discover new products? The best founders don't just build a product — they build a distribution engine. Because the market can't love a product it never sees.

7. Grit and Patience: The Spirit That Never Gives Up 💪

The final step in all of this is grit, resilience, and the spirit of never giving up.

Unfortunately, this isn't something I can teach you. No one can. You have to experience it yourself. Cursor is, once again, a good example. They built the product for years before the market was ready. They kept posting, kept DMing thousands of users, but most people ignored them. In hindsight it looks obvious, but at the time it was anything but.

The same pattern shows up everywhere. The Airbnb founders were rejected over and over, and at one point even funded the company by selling cereal boxes. Nvidia survived multiple near-death experiences before becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world. In the period after the FTX collapse, when most people thought crypto was dead, a startup called Rain that went through our incubation program launched. While others were leaving the industry, they kept building, and years later raised over $100 million at a $2 billion valuation.

These founders didn't succeed because they were smarter than you. They simply stayed in the game long enough for their insight to pay off.

In conclusion, the framework for startup success is as follows:

• Find a technological shift.
• Develop a unique insight.
• Obsess over the market.
• Talk to customers.
• Find a hair-on-fire problem.
• Build the simplest wedge.
• Win distribution.
• And most importantly, don't give up when it gets hard.

That's all. There's no secret. Most people won't do all of this consistently enough, for long enough. But the few who do will build the companies that the next generation of founders will study.

The world is yours.

Start right now.