The hardest part isn't building anymore

I can relate to this.
I started building a wiki project because I had been frustrated with existing wiki UIs and the deployment overhead for quite some time, so I decided to open-source it.
What made it interesting is that users started pulling it in their own direction. The writing experience felt good to them, it was fast, and over time it gained real traction: 500+ GitHub stars and around 40k downloads.
Now the question has changed for me.
It’s no longer only: “Can I build this?”
It’s: “Does this solve a problem people would actually pay for?”
Writing code has become easier in many ways, especially with today’s tooling. But choosing the right problem, the right stack, and solving things like performance and UX well is still hard.

This hits home, but from the buying side of things. Same exact trap — some deal pops up that "checks a lot of boxes" and suddenly you're rewriting your whole thesis to make it fit, instead of asking if it actually solves what you set out to solve.
Gonna steal that question tbh. Most stuff doesn't survive "did this solve a problem I had, or just create a shiny new one.

This resonates. It's easy to confuse activity with progress, but asking whether a customer will actually pay for something keeps the conversation grounded in reality.

Yes, that's right. For me, the biggest challenge isn't building anymore. It's finding the right audience who actually needs my product.

Yeah usually i just main toolset. Luckily, I don't get distracted easily or bombarded with tons of new tools, so it's easy for me to stay focused.

That question is such a good filter honestly, most of what looks urgent this week wouldn't have crossed my mind a month ago.

We've def rebuilt priorities around a shiny new tool before realizing it solved a problem we didn't actually have.

I ran a Microsoft partner business for 20 years and the filter that survived every hype cycle was revenue proximity: if the shiny thing doesn't touch closing, keeping, or serving a paying customer this quarter, it goes in a backlog I review monthly. Almost nothing earns its way out of that backlog. Your question is good, mine is shorter: will a customer pay for this?

This really resonates with me.

While building my own SaaS, I realized that every week there's a new "must-have" AI tool or framework that promises to change everything.

Looking back, none of those things mattered as much as simply finishing features that solved real customer problems.

Shipping consistently has been far more valuable than chasing every new trend.

Yeah — distribution is the problem now, and holding attention is the new currency. I'm living it: hunting for every crack I can find to push my own pet project through. It does seem to pass that filter question of yours — but passing it hasn't made distribution one bit easier. Feels like the trade-off is this: if building got easier (agree it has), we now have to get good at the things that stayed hard. Distribution's the big one.

This hits. The filter I use is basically "if I removed it, would anyone notice in a week?" — kills most of the shiny stuff instantly. Honestly the hardest distractions for me aren't new frameworks, they're feature ideas from people who aren't actually the user. Everyone's got an opinion on what would make it perfect.

That's a good question, but the thing that usually makes the answer obvious for me is repeated use. If a tool solves a problem I already have, I end up reaching for it without needing a reminder. If I have to invent a workflow just to justify it, it's probably just distraction in a productivity costume. I built DictaFlow because the same typing friction kept showing up in email, docs and prompts, and the tools that stuck were the ones that removed a pain I was already feeling that day.

This resonates hard. I just shipped a hyper-niche cheesemaking app and the build genuinely was perhaps the easy step — finding the tiny, scattered audience is the real work and the challenge to me. I've been leaning on being useful in the communities those users already live in, instead of broadcasting to my own empty channels. Curious what moved the needle most for you: communities, partnerships, or paid?

That "does this solve a problem I already have, or did it create a problem I didn't know I had?" line is gold.

I just finished a 6-day project doing exactly this — separate real opportunities from shiny distractions. My Day 5 layer forces "is someone already paying for this?" If no, the idea gets capped at 60/100. It killed 2 of my "best" ideas that I was emotionally attached to.

For B2B positioning, do you see founders chasing pains that feel real but don't actually convert to paid customers?

This tracks with what most builders discover the hard way — the tooling got commoditized, the judgment calls didn't. What's the part that's actually gotten harder for you: picking what to build, or knowing when to stop building and start selling it?

Agreed, and it changed my daily structure completely: building is now the reward, not the work. I do distribution first (comments, DMs, showing up where my buyers are) and only touch code after. Uncomfortable at first - now it's the only reason anything I ship gets seen.

Love this idea

This hit harder than expected.

I'm building a consumer mobile app, and the distribution gap is genuinely the part nobody warns you about. I spent months getting the core experience right — photo organisation, smart categorisation, a clean UI — and assumed that if it worked well, people would find it. They don't.

What's made it worse is that "growth advice" for consumer apps is all over the place. One week it's ASO, the next it's TikTok, then it's influencer seeding, then it's Reddit communities. I've had to get very deliberate about filtering what's actually relevant to my specific user and channel vs. what's just noise that someone had success with in a completely different context.

The test I've landed on is similar to yours: does this tactic reach the exact person who has the problem I solve, in a moment when they're thinking about that problem? Most things fail that test.

The hardest thing isn't even ignoring bad advice — it's ignoring good advice that just isn't right for you yet. Timing matters as much as the tactic itself.

That filter is useful. If it does not map to a pain I already feel or a customer has repeated, I try to park it instead of turning it into roadmap work.

Its made seem as tho building is just what you do but they forget the advertise your specific niche of people whod go to war for your product

So true

This is so true! 🔥
Building is easier than ever, but protecting focus is the real battle. That question — “Does this solve a problem I already have?” — is gold. I’ve started using something similar and it’s saved me so much wasted time.
Thanks for the reminder!

Yes, the product has been created, but it is difficult to verify whether it meets everyone's needs

Spot on, Sonu. The digital noise is louder than ever right now. Rebuilding your roadmap around this week's trending post is the fastest way to build a bloated product that solves nothing well. I've found that setting strict 2-week freeze windows on the tech stack/strategy helps us actually execute before we let the outside noise back in. That filter question is a game-changer.

Great post – this hit close to home.

I’m in the middle of building a medication‑tracking app for family caregivers, and I’ve caught myself multiple times almost pivoting based on “what’s hot” this week. Last month it was “you absolutely need an AI chatbot for health logs.” The month before, it was “switch to Jetpack Compose or your app is dead.”

The real kicker? None of my early testers – actual family members caring for elderly parents – ever asked for AI or a new UI framework. They asked for bigger buttons, fewer taps, and a way to see last week’s blood pressure readings without scrolling.

So I started using a variation of your question, but even more brutal:

“If I remove this, would the user notice within a week?”

Most shiny things fail that test immediately. The ones that pass are usually boring – reliable notifications, offline support, simple data export for doctor visits. Not exciting to build, but genuinely useful.

I also keep a “parking lot” document. Whenever I see a new trend that seems interesting, I write it down with a date and a note: “Re‑evaluate in 30 days if users complain about X.” 90 % of those notes never get touched again. That helped me stop rebuilding my roadmap every Monday.

One thing I’d add: the hardest distractions aren’t tech or growth hacks – they’re feature requests from well‑meaning friends. Everyone has an opinion on what “would make it perfect.” But unless they’re actually waking up at 6 am to give medication to a grandparent, their suggestion is often just… interesting, not essential.

Thanks for sharing this – it’s a good reminder to stay anchored to the actual job‑to‑be‑done. Would love to hear how you enforce that filter in practice (do you have a weekly review, or is it more of a gut check?).

This resonates so much! My version of this: I ask if the problem came from an actual user, or from a tweet by someone selling the fix.
Second bucket is basically always "this would be more fun to build than the boring feature my users actually asked for." Once I said that out loud to myself, most shiny things stopped being tempting.

Your filter question is the right one, and I'd add the failure mode I actually hit: it's less that I chase every shiny tool and more that I let it quietly reorder what I'm already working on. The roadmap doesn't get rewritten in one decision — it drifts one "must-have" at a time.

What stopped it for me wasn't more willpower in the moment, it was sorting work by time-horizon up front: short-term cashflow stuff in one bucket, the long-term bet in another. Then when something gets posted this week, the question isn't "is this good" — it's "which bucket does this even belong to, and is that bucket actually starving?" Most of the time the answer is neither, and it's easy to drop. What burns people out is treating every new thing as if it might be the big fish. Keep one line out for the big fish; don't re-bait it every time the feed moves.

i had the same problem and want to know my self

This is exactly what I’m learning while building an AI-structured meeting-notes product. The distraction isn’t just adding features — it’s letting every new model, framework, or launch tactic quietly change the roadmap.
I’m trying to judge everything by one question now: does this make the user’s real workflow easier, or just make the product feel more advanced?
That alone removes a lot of “must-haves.”

Right

Yup, this resonates. This is where fundamentals and basic mental models come in. I often have to remind myself to focus on two key things: revenue and retention. If I can't easily justify how it's directly related to those, it's very likely a shiny distraction.

This really resonates. I think one of the biggest challenges today isn't the lack of opportunities—it's the sheer abundance of them. I've started asking myself a similar question: "Would I still care about this idea if nobody was talking about it this week?" If the answer is no, it's usually just a distraction. Staying focused on the original problem you're trying to solve seems to be an underrated skill for builders.

One thing I've noticed is that trends create a different kind of FOMO. You stop optimizing for your users and start optimizing for what everyone else is talking about. Ironically, the products that stand out usually have founders who ignore most of the noise. How do you distinguish between a genuine market shift and a temporary hype cycle?

The part that hit me is AI didn't just make building faster, it made the uncertainty come faster. When a build took months, the doubt got rationed out across them. Now the thing ships in an afternoon and you land on "will anyone actually want this" weeks earlier, with all that runway still there to stew in.

I'm pre-first-sale on my current one, so I don't have the resolved version. But your line about the first sale doing more for your head than any building did is exactly what I keep hearing from people a step ahead of me. Shipping was never the proof. Someone paying is, and nothing you build fills in for that.

I was just writing about attention prioritization on my Substack. This is great.

This resonates hard. Building got 10x easier; getting the first eyeballs got harder. What I've realized: posting to your own channels when you have no audience is basically shouting in an empty room — the leverage is going where the audience already is (communities, other people's threads, the exact conversations your buyer is already having). The build is a weekend; the distribution is the actual job. Still figuring it out myself, but that reframe alone changed how I spend my time.

Bullseye... Nowadays, with AI at our fingertips, everything is much easier. The only problem is knowing how to choose the tools that best serve us. We have to be very careful not to get caught in a loop of "do this, improve that, just one more little thing," and so on, in an endless loop — loopify!

Building feels safe because there's always a next step. You know what to do. Finding the right people and actually getting them to try the thing has no clear next step, just a lot of uncomfortable guessing and silence.

What helped for me was stopping trying to "do marketing" and just going to the places where the exact pain lives and talking about it honestly. Not pitching, just being in those conversations. Doesn't scale fast but the feedback you get is real, not just polite nodding.

This hits hard. The temptation to try every new AI model or framework is real because building gives you that instant 'progress' high without any market risk.

Your filter question is gold, but how do you enforce it when the FOMO kicks in? Do you keep a 'maybe later' backlog, or do you strictly limit your tech stack?

Watching this exact shift happen in book publishing. Writing a book used to be the moat, now an AI-assisted author can produce a decent draft in weeks, so the moat moved to distribution and trust, same as with SaaS. It's why we ended up bolting a marketplace onto Automateed (AI book creator) instead of just selling the creation tool: the tool solves the easy half, buyers were struggling with the half that actually decides if anyone reads the thing. Building-in-public folks figured this out years ago, authors are hitting it now.

This hit home. I just went through it.

Got laid off after 10 years in QA and built two products in about 60 days. A CLI tool and a set of guides. The building was the easy part. AI made shipping fast in a way that would have taken me months a few years ago.

The hard part was the uncertainty. Not knowing if anyone would actually buy. Not knowing if the tool would work for someone who was not me. Not knowing if the audience was even real or if I was just building something nobody asked for.

You can grind through building. You know what to do next, you just do it. But sitting with the question of whether any of it matters while your runway ticks down is a completely different kind of hard.

What finally helped was just putting it in front of people. First sale told me the audience was real. That did more for my head than any amount of building did.

This hits the spot. Honestly, building carries zero rejection risk, so our brains naturally run toward a new framework or AI model because it feels like progress. The real trap is that these tools arrive looking like solutions, but we only realize they were distractions after wasting a week integrating them.

Absolutely agree . Few days back I launched a worthy product but it's not achieving the attention which it needs to achieve that's because finding the real audience is much harder than building the software

The distraction wearing a productivity costume line is the most accurate description of how new tools actually enter a workflow. They arrive feeling like solutions and only reveal themselves as distractions after you've spent a week integrating something that didn't need to exist in your stack.

The repeat usage filter is the right one. A tool you installed and keep opening without thinking about it has earned its place. A tool you installed and have to remind yourself to use is already a problem you created for yourself.

The tell you named is real: building carries zero rejection risk, so we run to it. Years ago I made a rule that the day starts with the uncomfortable outreach before I touch anything I want to build, because otherwise it never gets done. The founders who win are usually the ones who got comfortable being told no.

One filter that's helped us: if a new opportunity changes your roadmap every week, it's probably a distraction.

The best founders don't chase every trend. They validate, prioritize, and execute.

That's why Foundersbar's Market Validation process focuses on real customer signals before new features, pivots, or growth experiments: https://foundersbar.com/market-validation-for-startups

The line that got me was the comment about building carrying zero rejection risk. That's exactly my trap — I'm non-technical and AI will build me any feature I ask for in an afternoon, so "ship one more feature" feels like momentum while the scary work (emailing users, asking why they didn't come back) just sits there untouched. Your filter question is good; I think I need a harsher one: "is this a distraction from talking to a user?" Because most of the time it is. How do you personally force yourself back toward the uncomfortable work once you catch the drift?

I think the hardest part is knowing when to say yes to something new.

Most of the time, the right answer is actually no.

Every new tool, feature, or strategy has an opportunity cost. If it doesn’t clearly move your product or customers forward today, it’s probably just stealing focus. I try to default to saying no unless something solves a problem I’ve already identified or fits the roadmap I already have.

the filter question is good. the one i'd stack next to it: "who benefits from me believing this is urgent right now?" almost every "must-have" is a problem manufactured by someone whose growth depends on you adopting it. the urgency is a marketing artifact, not a fact about your business.

and the tell that you've already been captured: your roadmap moves based on what you READ this week, not what your users SAID this week. if the last three things you added came from IH or Twitter threads instead of customer conversations, the treadmill already won, you just haven't noticed yet.

protecting attention is mostly refusing to outsource your roadmap to whoever posted loudest.

I've felt this while building promptprobe. Every week there's a new model , framework or agent pattern that looks exciting. I am trying to optimize for one thing instead: " will this help someone trust their prompts more? " If the answer is no , it goes on the backlog.

This resonates.

A lot of new tools make building feel like progress, but they also give you a very convenient way to avoid the harder stuff: talking to users, selling, narrowing the market.

The filter I like is simple: did this come from a real user pain, or from me wanting to play with the new thing?

For me it came down to timing. The shiny new framework or growth hack always got interesting on exactly the days I was supposed to do the uncomfortable non-build work, like emailing users who churned or following up on a sales conversation. Building feels like progress and carries zero rejection risk, so the brain reaches for it right when the scary distribution task is next up.

So now when something grabs me, the first thing I check is what I was about to do right before it grabbed me. Usually there's an outreach or selling task sitting there that I'd been quietly avoiding, and the new tool was just a better-looking way to skip it. The stuff that's genuinely worth it still looks worth it a week later when I'm not dodging anything, so a 'revisit in a week' note ends up filtering most of it for free.

What's worked for me is treating the roadmap like a locked sprint — anything shiny that shows up mid-week goes into a "maybe later" list instead of the current build, no matter how good it sounds in the moment. I only revisit that list once a month, and by then most of it has quietly aged out on its own; whatever's still worth doing is obvious without much debate. It's less about judging the idea while you're excited about it (hard to do objectively) and more about removing your own ability to act on it immediately. The one thing that skips the queue is a paying user actually blocked by something today.

The star-vs-install gap is the cleanest filter I've found for exactly this. A star means "neat, might use that someday." An install means someone actually hit a wall and reached for it. When you sort a big pile of tools by installs instead of stars, the top of the two lists barely overlaps: most of the hyped stuff never gets run twice.

Your question is the same test from the tool's side. If something has been out a few months and still has near-zero repeat usage, it created a problem, it didn't solve one.

The other thing that helps me: I only let a new tool in if I can name the specific task in my current week it removes. If I have to invent a use case for it, it's a distraction wearing a productivity costume.

the tell for me: shiny stuff is almost always about the build (new framework, new model) — because adopting tech feels like progress without customer risk. it's procrastination that looks like work. real opportunities usually show up as a customer already paying, in time or money, to work around something. your question plus "is a real user actually bleeding over this?" kills most of it.

Building your roadmap is good but adding which company stage are you targeting your product helps you filter out the noise even more.
"Peace of Mind, and Focus."