It took an afternoon to find out that the thing I wanted to build already existed. I hadn’t looked. Because I liked the idea.
I want to tell that properly, because the order it happened in is the whole point.
It started with an RFP. Those land on your desk already shaped as a solution, here’s what we want built, tell us how and how much, and the process rewards you for taking the question as given. Sometimes that shape is right and somebody did the hard thinking before they wrote it. This time the more I read, the more the interesting question looked like the problem underneath the ask, and whether anyone had sat with that long enough to know what would actually help.
So we didn’t answer it. We built something small instead, on our own time, not to sell, but to put in front of a few organizations we’re close to and have honest conversations. Is this the real problem? Does this help, or does it only look like it should?
There were two ways to find out. Months of conversations, which is what we did. Or an afternoon looking at who already sells into it.
Both answer the same question. I picked the one that couldn’t tell me no quickly.
I didn’t see that at the time. The whole way through I was carrying an assumption I had never once checked. That a gap existed here. That this was a problem people had left alone.
When I finally went and looked, they were there. Several of them, for years, further along than us and better resourced for it. One of them doing at scale the thing we’d been sketching on a whiteboard.
It took an afternoon.
That’s the number that bothers me, and it should. Not because an afternoon of searching is real diligence, it isn’t, and I’d be giving you bad advice if I told you it was. Finding out someone else is in a market tells you the market is real. It doesn’t tell you your version shouldn’t exist. Plenty of good products arrived second.
An afternoon bothers me because of what it revealed about the months before it. The check was cheap. It was available the entire time. And I didn’t run it.
I’ve thought about why, and the answer isn’t flattering and isn’t complicated. I liked the idea. I was enjoying it. Somewhere underneath all that understanding of the problem, I had quietly stopped wanting to find out that someone had beaten me to it, and so I did every piece of diligence except the one that could have taken it away from me.
There is almost always one check you haven’t run. And it’s almost always the one whose answer you would least like to hear. Excitement is remarkably good at doing your research for you and then telling you it’s finished.
It doesn’t only happen to people building products. It’s the director who already knows which vendor she wants and reads the other two proposals to be fair rather than to be persuaded. It’s the executive approving the project he championed, who asks how rather than whether. It’s the engineer three weeks into a rewrite he chose, who has stopped asking what the old thing was doing right. Same shape every time. The unexamined thing is rarely random. It’s specifically the thing you’re attached to.
So the practice is small and it isn’t comfortable. Look at what you’re about to commit to and find the question you haven’t asked. Then be honest about why. If it’s genuinely hard, fine, schedule it. If it’s because you’d rather not know, that’s the one to run first, today, before you’ve spent anyone’s money.
And be careful of how satisfying the rest of your diligence feels. Mine felt like enough. None of it touched the assumption holding the whole thing up. You can do a great deal of honest work in a direction you haven’t earned yet.
It stung… I’d been enjoying the idea. There’s a particular quiet in finding out the interesting problem you found is one other people already solved.
But finding out next year would have cost a lot more than a bad afternoon, and by then it would have cost other people too, not just me.