Why your vision is killing your company—and what to do instead
In an era where AI has made supply infinite, demand has become the scarcest resource in business. Yet most founders are still building products nobody wants.
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Founders are told to be "visionary" and "build what people don't know they need." This advice leads to building expensive solutions for problems that don't exist.
AI and digital tools have made it trivially easy to build products. The constraint has flipped: anyone can build anything, but finding people who actually want it is the real challenge.
Millions are spent building features, products, and companies based on founder intuition rather than validated demand signals—money that could have been saved or better invested.
This book challenges the mythology of visionary founders and reveals a counterintuitive truth: the most successful "visionaries" weren't creating demand—they were detecting it better than anyone else.
Steve Jobs didn't create the demand for smartphones. Elon Musk didn't create the demand for electric vehicles. They detected existing demand signals that others missed or ignored.
When Netflix invested $100M in House of Cards without a pilot, people called it a visionary bet. The truth? They had data showing millions of users watched political dramas, British series, and Kevin Spacey films. It wasn't vision—it was superior demand detection.
The Segway had everything except what mattered: actual demand. Brilliant engineering, massive investment, celebrity endorsements—but nobody needed it. It solved a problem people didn't have. The difference between success and failure wasn't execution, it was demand.
Tesla didn't try to convince everyone they needed electric cars. They detected existing demand among early adopters willing to pay premium prices for performance EVs. They built for proven demand, then expanded outward.
Learn the frameworks and strategies for detecting demand before you invest time and resources building products nobody wants.
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