For three years I thought building software worked like this: I get an idea, I build it, I ship it, and let's see what it catches.
Eight projects, none of them finished, zero users.
And I spent all of it sitting at my desk, sitting on the couch, asking an LLM, reading forums, looking for validation inside documents, and I honestly thought that was research.
I had my ideal customer perfectly defined, the problem is that this customer existed under my own description, with the characteristics I gave him myself, and the ideal customer isn't in a document or a text file or a social media post, he's out in the field, he's on the street.
Four months ago I went out to find him.
