Insight is All You Need
A few weeks ago, I used Replit to build a website called Inkprint. It is a website that allows people to demo tattoos on their own skin. When I was building this, I didn’t really have an idea of who the customer was, besides the fact that I wanted to demo out some tattoos because I was thinking about getting a new one.
I got into a deep dive and spent a whole afternoon, about six hours, building out this website. It was really impressive. I was able to integrate Stripe, authentication, and all the AI models needed very, very quickly, and get it all deployed. It was super exciting, and I was super grateful to have had the opportunity to do that.
The Classic Mistake
Later that week, though, I looked at what tattoo artists think of AI models in tattoo art. What is funny is that there is so much more a tattoo artist does to convince a person, or to help them iterate towards the idea they would actually want on their skin for their entire life.
What I realized was that, even though I had an idea for a product, I made a very classic mistake. I didn’t really fully understand what the customer wanted or needed, and I wasn’t sitting in the shoes of the customer. As a customer who goes to a tattoo shop, I want the person to help me figure out and validate that what I want is a good or fun idea, help me iterate on the art, and then add it in a way that is a good experience. AI doesn’t necessarily help you do that.
In terms of building something someone actually wants, you would actually probably be much better off creating a website that allows tattoo artists to better manage their inbound via Instagram, rather than creating an AI tattoo generator.
The Chutes and Ladders of Startups
This brings me to what I sort of call the chutes and ladders of startups. You can spend so much time iterating on the wrong idea and concept if you don’t truly understand the end customer or the dynamics of a market. Actually, it is the understanding that predicates any sort of success, because that understanding of the customer and of the market itself is what allows you to create the strategy that will then be successful.
Of course, you also need a bunch of execution, and I kind of bucket insight into execution. But it is actually about having the emotional maturity not to immediately jump to a market problem or get too caught up in excitement. While that excitement can feel good in the moment, it can be intellectually dishonest and lack the insight required to actually go and build the right product for the customer.
The Danger of the Rabbit Hole: Excitement without insight can take you down rabbit holes that will effectively make you spend years working on things that don’t really matter. It can also make you try to take cheat codes that you think are cheat codes, but really are things that have been tried and are not loopholes. Instead, they are holes you can fall into and never come back out of when you’re navigating startup dilemmas.
On the other hand, at times you can find insights that are true hacks in the world that no one else has really found because you are the first person to really think of it and be able to execute on it. Those things can take you much, much further as a result too.
Insight Over Execution
My tattoo shop idea is a very simplified version of this, but this exists at scale for everything in startups. It is why insight is more valuable than most execution, even though there is sort of a trope that execution is what really matters.
You need to be able to build the product.
You need to be able to sell to the customers.
But more than that, you need to be able to understand what the customer and the market needs at a given point in time.
That, in and of itself, ends up being more of an art than a science, and it is one that is extremely, extremely, extremely rare in a person, and hard to replicate.