AI Will Make It Easier Than Ever to Build the Wrong Product
If one should remember one thing from The Lean Startup book, it is this: Companies fail because they develop in an excellent way the wrong product.
This is just so true. There is no founder, no entrepreneur, who has not gone through this. Usually in a painful way.
AI Will Only Accelerate This Problem
In the era of AI, this will only accelerate. Now virtually everyone will be capable of developing and launching a new product. What are the chances, though, that it will be the right product?
I expect that the internet will get full of garbage.
Still, this should not disappoint us. The reality of the matter is that implementation cost is becoming near-zero. Building is becoming easy. Finding what is actually worth building is still hard.
And that is exactly why the opportunity is so big.
Those who are wise enough, and patient enough, to find the right product, in other words to find a truly worth-solving problem, those will be the champions of the new era.
And there will be many of them.
That is why I think GenAI marks the beginning of the era of the entrepreneur, the era of the founders, the era of the makers.
The Hidden Advantage: Existing Companies
Something many people still underestimate, however, is this: the opportunity is great for individuals, but it is even greater for existing companies.
Why? Because existing companies are often much better equipped than anyone else to identify a genuinely worth-solving problem. They are already close to the customer. They already see pain points, inefficiencies, unmet needs, repetition. And they are in a much stronger position to validate with both existing and prospective customers.
I really think that we shall see several startups and scale-ups achieve explosive growth out of embracing this reality. A new generation of scale-ups is being born right now, in front of our eyes.
Be Contrarian: AI’s Biggest Impact Is in Product
Last but not least: be contrarian.
Most people out there focus on the impact of AI in engineering. Many others focus on customer-facing functions, like support and sales.
I am not saying these are not important. Of course they are.
But if you think more deeply about it, you may rather agree that Product is where AI can make the huge difference.
Because Product is where the real question sits: what should we build in the first place?
AI can help teams explore faster, prototype faster, test assumptions faster, process feedback faster. All this matters a lot. But the real value is not just speed. It is better judgment.
And better judgment around what is worth building is where the next big winners will come from.
