Author: Imran

Translator: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Sitting in front of the computer, you have the idea of starting a business. You see Cursor sold to Elon Musk for 60 billion dollars. Perhaps the idols of the previous generation were Mark Zuckerberg or Evan Spiegel. You look at these founders and can’t help but compare yourself to them. They don’t seem much smarter than you. Their resumes are no more impressive than yours.

So you naturally ask yourself: why can’t I do the same thing? Most founders’ journeys start here. But this is also where most founders get stuck.

They see artificial intelligence. They see cryptocurrency. They see thousands of startups that have already received funding. Every track seems to be crowded. Every obvious idea has already been put into practice.

They conclude: the opportunities are exhausted.

So they close their computers, give up, and walk away.

A large portion of startups are thus stillborn. Not because the founders lack ability, but because they believe the game is already over.

Let’s take Cursor as an example. Not every path is a smooth road.

As early as 2022, Cursor began its arduous "glass-chewing" journey. That was before the birth of ChatGPT. There was no ready-made script to copy. There was no obvious market. There was only one belief: artificial intelligence would fundamentally change knowledge work.

To stay grounded, they focused on three things. First, they chose a field that genuinely excited them: artificial intelligence. Second, they became their own product's customers. Third, they unwaveringly focused on heavy users.

Because if you can win over heavy users, dealing with everyone else becomes easy. Frankly, this is not a story unique to Cursor.

When Stripe started, the online payment issue seemed to be solved, but the founders strongly believed that developers would increasingly become decision-makers within companies; whoever wins over developers will ultimately win the internet. They had personally experienced this pain point; although PayPal had proven the feasibility of online payments, Stripe saw the opportunity to build a "developer-first" version of the future.

Figma spent several years developing before the market was ready because they believed the future of design did not lie in a better single design tool, but in collaborative design where everyone works in the same file. Google Docs had already shown the immense power of real-time collaboration in documents. Figma extended this insight to the design field.

Shopify initially started just to sell snowboards online because the founders believed millions of small businesses yearned to have their own customers, brands, and destinies, rather than relying on large platforms. Amazon had proven that centralized e-commerce worked. Shopify bet that entrepreneurs would ultimately want to seize control.

Different products. The same model.

Every founder starts with a non-consensus belief about the direction of world development, and then quietly spends years building before that future becomes obvious to everyone. Their luck lies in riding the strong winds of the era.

For Stripe, this wind is the certainty that more and more business activities will shift online. For Figma, it is the belief that software will be cloud-first and default to supporting collaboration. For Shopify, it is the hope that the internet will empower millions of entrepreneurs to build independent careers.

Cursor follows a similar trajectory. The founding of this company is based on the belief that artificial intelligence will fundamentally reshape knowledge work, and that software engineers will be among the first heavy users to adopt it. Today, this product may seem taken for granted, but when they started, there was no clear guidance. Only belief supported them.

Different products. Different markets. The same underlying logic.

Identify long-term trend shifts early, find the entry points that others have missed, and spend years executing before the rest of the market catches up. Everything has a shadow. PayPal birthed Stripe. Adobe birthed Figma. Amazon birthed Shopify.

First-generation products prove the market's existence. Second-generation products reconstruct it around new insights, new technologies, or shifting customer behaviors. For founders, the important question is to figure out at what stage of the cycle they find themselves. If you enter early, like Coinbase or Cursor, your opportunity typically lies in making new technologies practically usable for heavy users.

Coinbase did not invent cryptocurrency. It simply made buying and holding Bitcoin extremely easy, far better than managing a wallet yourself or wiring funds to Mt. Gox.

Cursor also did not invent AI programming. It simply realized that autocomplete was not the end goal; what developers truly craved was a native software development approach using AI.

But if you enter the late or mid-stage of a technological revolution, opportunities often present different aspects. The infrastructure is already in place. The market has been validated. Your job is no longer to prove whether the technology works, but to find the "shadow" for the existing "light," which is the blind spot overlooked by the first-generation players. Many of the greatest companies are born here.

Now that you have identified your position in the technological shift, you have a few ideas and are ready to start making a big move, but soon you will realize a disconcerting fact: you actually do not have many unique insights. You do not have a profound understanding of the market, customers, or even the product. And this is perfectly normal.

At this moment, you must roll up your sleeves and start to build your network, insights, and reputation. Fortunately, we live in an era with X (Twitter), making all of this easier than ever. You can build an audience, meet customers, interact with heavy users, and learn directly from those shaping the market.

The first thing I would do is to experience every product in that field. If you start a business in a certain track but are not a heavy user of the benchmark product, it becomes hard to have unique insights about market trends. Review every product in the ecosystem. Become a heavy user of each one. Talk to those who love them, those who hate them, and those who have already given up on them. Understand why they stayed, why they left, and the features they wish existed but currently do not.

In the end, you will find that most market victories are not because existing companies are foolish. They are replaced precisely because they became successful.

As companies grow, they naturally drift further away from individual users. Feedback loops lengthen, edge needs are overlooked, and a new generation of heavy users emerges that do not align with the existing products. This is where new founders find opportunities.

The goal is not to come up with an idea in isolation. The goal is to immerse yourself deeply in the market until the missing puzzle pieces become obvious. Once you do this long enough, you will stop deliberately looking for ideas, and instead, start discovering them everywhere. This is the state you want to reach. Ultimately, you will find that there are so many opportunities that you can’t handle them all.

Next comes the hard part: choosing one of them.

Once you identify an idea that you believe is correct, the next question is simple: is it a tenfold improvement or a pressing pain point? If the answer is no, then don’t waste your effort. People rarely switch products for minor improvements. They only choose to switch when something is significantly better or when the pain point is severe enough to require immediate resolution.

The simplest way to find pressing pain points is to discover those who are already tinkering with workaround solutions. Spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, cumbersome manual processes, and copying data between different systems are all signals.

The best founders are always looking for pain points because when a pain point is significant enough, customers will eagerly snatch the product from your hands. And when the pain point is trivial, no amount of marketing, growth hacking, or clever positioning will save you.

Now that you have identified the idea, found the pain point, and are building an MVP (Minimum Viable Product).

With Claude, Codex, and various AI tools, building a product has become easier than ever. Ironically, this also became its own trap.

I found myself continuously adding various features just because I "could." The product slowly became a patchwork monster, like Frankenstein. Each feature made sense in isolation, but together made the product worse.

In the end, I returned to first principles. The most important question is not what features I should develop, but why would someone abandon their existing tools for your product?

Every great startup has an answer to this question. Cursor could have developed another programming plugin. Instead, they forked VS Code. Developers already liked this editor, understood how it worked, and had embedded it into their daily workflows.

Cursor did not ask users to learn something entirely new. It simply allowed users to continue doing what they already loved, integrating AI directly into that experience.

The best startups rarely force users to learn entirely new behavior patterns. Instead, they find familiar processes, remove friction, and make them significantly better.

As founders, we become obsessed with what we are building. However, customers care about what they have to give up. The lower the switching costs and the higher the created value, the faster the adoption. That’s why the best MVPs don't have abundant features. They are extremely focused, providing customers with an irresistible reason to switch.

At this stage, you have identified the pain point, built the MVP, and hopefully provided customers with a compelling reason to choose you. Next comes the stage that most founders tend to underestimate: distribution channels.

I have seen many founders spend months pouring their heart into the product but only spend five minutes thinking about how users will discover it. The fact is, distribution channels are often the real moat.

Airbnb's success was not because its website was better. The founders knocked on doors, personally took photos of apartments, and manually guided landlords city by city into the platform. Stripe recruited developers one by one. Long before cryptocurrency became mainstream, Coinbase was active in major Bitcoin forums.

Cursor is also a great example. Their team posted on Hacker News six times. Most posts fell flat. They sent private messages to thousands of developers, patiently listened to feedback, and fought to gain users one by one.

Today, everyone says Cursor’s success was inevitable. But for years, what they did were efforts that could not be scaled.

Founders love to talk about product-market fit, but before achieving product-market fit, the first thing to solve is distribution channel-market fit. Where do your customers spend their time? Who do they trust? How do they discover new products? The best founders do not only build products. They build distribution engines. Because the market cannot love products it has never seen.

The final stage of all this is resilience, adaptability, and never giving up.

Unfortunately, I cannot teach you these things. No one can. They can only be experienced through personal experience.

Cursor once again serves as an excellent case. They spent several years developing before the market matured. They repeatedly posted and sent private messages to thousands of users, but were ignored by most. In hindsight, everything seems logical. But at the time, the future seemed bleak.

The same pattern can be found everywhere.

The founders of Airbnb faced numerous rejections and even had to sell cereal boxes to keep the company running.

NVIDIA faced several near-death experiences before eventually becoming one of the most valuable companies in the world.

Rain, one of the startups in our incubation batch, was born after the collapse of FTX, when most people believed the crypto industry was dead. While others fled the industry, they persisted in building. Years later, they raised over 100 million dollars at a valuation of 2 billion dollars.

The lesson drawn from this is not that these founders are smarter than you. Rather, they persisted in this game long enough to have their insights compound.

Therefore, I have laid out the entire framework for you.

Look for shifts in technology cycles. Cultivate unique insights. Be obsessed with the market you are in. Communicate with customers. Find pressing pain points. Create the simplest entry point possible. Win your rightful distribution channel.

Most importantly, when everything becomes difficult, never give up.

That's it.

There are no secrets. Most people cannot consistently do these things over the long term. And the very few who do end up building the great companies that the next generation of founders will study.

The world is yours.

Go create.

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