nobody tells you how incoherent it feels

most people misunderstand consumer companies, because they only see the output: the stars, the unicorns, the rainbows. twitter and linkedin are very good at glorifying exactly that.

here's the part nobody frames honestly: even after a huge amount of hard work, there's a lot of dumb luck.

i hate that word. i hate it to my core. but it's true. i'm not slapping the label of "luck" on everything. i'm saying it takes an undying, relentless amount of agency and optimism, mixed with exposure, to put yourself in luck's path.

what it actually takes

by exposure i mean talking to every single person who could possibly unlock 100x distribution for you. and alongside that:

• founder intuition: picking up the weirdest signals from the market, your competitors, and your audience's online behavior
• taste: executing all of it in your own unique way (what twitter now just calls "taste")
• the loop: product iterations plus distribution, over and over

a successful consumer company asks you to be great at all of them at once: agency + founder intuition, exposure + taste, product iterations + distribution.

the part that makes people quit

and the worst part? you don't even know if you're early, wrong, or just irrelevant. those three feel exactly the same while you're in it.

they look the same from the outside too. notion in 2015 was two people who had cut the whole team, moved to kyoto, and were rebuilding a product nobody wanted. every dashboard said dead. they were early. clubhouse in 2021 had every signal you dream about: exploding usage, a $4b valuation, every celebrity you could name doing live rooms. every dashboard said generational. it was wrong.

same fog, opposite endings. the market tells you which one you were years later, and not a day sooner.

there's a mechanical reason for the fog. consumer feedback is sparse, lagging, and noisy, and silence from the market is compatible with all three explanations. you can't a/b test your way out of it either, because the real sample size is one: your company.

this is why most people quit. not because it's hard. because it's incoherent.

ai made the fog thicker

here's the twist nobody prices in: ai compressed the build loop, not the feedback loop. you can ship ten times the experiments per month now. users still adopt, churn, and talk at human speed. more moves, same amount of signal. the fog per move went up.

even the professionals admit they can't read the early numbers anymore: a16z started measuring consumer ai retention from month three of a cohort, because the first two months are mostly tourists.

keep moving

think the sasuke vs itachi fight. every time you think it's real, it's just another genjutsu. you keep making moves, adjusting, committing harder. only to realize none of it was real.

and still, you have to engage with that ridiculously stupid optimism in you, and keep moving like you know exactly what you're doing.