One of the rarest feelings in the world is resonance. There’s an immediate recognition when something is finely tuned to you. It deciphers your interiority. It feeds your innermost desire to feel seen and known.
Exactitude is a virtue. But the process toward it is unbelievably laborious. So, when you see true understanding applied, you notice. When someone amends themselves specifically to your needs, you feel seen and loved.
The same can be said for products that stand out in the torrential pour of the current market. Software has gotten cheaper and more accessible to build. Thorny problems are abundant, and we finally have a technological blade sharp enough. In any given category, AI-native first movers race to conquer the market. Land and expand quickly to own the platform and amass a proprietary pool of data, while fast followers chase an earmarked trail.
There will be really huge and valuable horizontal companies. Companies that become the swiss army knife for building internal AI automations, or AI-enabled productivity tooling applied to any sector. But what interests me is vertical solutions solving hyper-local, extremely specific problems. So while the vertical differs: healthcare, construction, manufacturing, the shape of pursuit rhymes.
As models continue to get smarter it becomes increasingly apparent: Intelligence is cheap, true understanding is expensive. Specificity, then, is not simply beautiful, it is rational.
The biggest changes need to occur in sectors or industries that are heavily manual or human-centric. Which comes with all the frustrating complex problems that are human relationships. For example, proof of value isn’t enough for a reticent user to adopt and champion a product. It has to map to a specific budget, perhaps only exists because a budget was created. Perhaps you even have to trojan-horse it into an organization, starting with the smallest, least offensive wedge or use case.
Specificity matters a great deal. And specificity comes with deep understanding: being embedded so closely to your customers that you gain an unfettered level of context. Keystroke to keystroke. It’s the Forward Deployed Engineer model where engineers live on customer sites for months and field feedback flows directly into product. It’s building a true hard-won community to create evangelist buyers in experts: in developer or designer communities for example. It’s personal. It’s about empowerment of the oft-neglected internal champion. It’s the founder who still replies to customer support tickets, who sends the handwritten card. It’s the razor discipline to not dilute your focus: instead of being wild-eyed about how much land there is to build upon, you kneel down and assess the quality and salinity of the dirt. Stay close to the soil, maybe that’s the mantra.
Understanding cannot be outsourced or cheapened. Of course intelligence speeds up time to context baseline. You can probably determine blurrily, in vague hand-waving territory, the actions that are directionally correct. But true understanding — identifying the spot of maximal local pain and gaining a hyperrealistic view of someone’s actual daily burdens is rare. This is the biggest difference I see in densely competitive areas of software creation. There will be many who are lifted by momentum, but few that are obsessively, precisely exacting about what bets to place where and when. But that makes all the difference.