It’s easy to vibe code a software product, harder to maintain it, and challenging to monetize it. “Only one in ten apps we build generates any profit. One in twenty generates serious profit.” That feels like the new baseline among my tech friends.
My friends with product background are becoming more technical in their day jobs, and they can now research new domains much faster. Still, none of them say their AI skills result in more value for users.
The more users you get, the more expensive it becomes to ship the wrong things, especially while your competitors are shipping the right things at a new speed.
So how to stay laser-focused on building things people actually want?
Customer interviews, pre-registrations, surveys, prototypes, and data analytics all help validate product hypotheses. They give you more confidence, but they do not prove the most important thing: paid demand.
There is an old saying that customers vote with their wallets. What if users could literally vote with their money on what they want before we build it?
To make this more relevant to startup reality: what if we launched a poll where upcoming product features were the options, and users could vote with their funds for the features they truly care about?