You have an idea. It feels important. So you start “building.”
This is the most common excuse. The most noble-sounding form of procrastination. Building feels like progress. You’re writing code, designing interfaces, setting up databases.
It’s busy work.
It keeps you safe from the one thing that actually matters: the truth.
Doing what you said you would is hard. It might fail. So we make excuses. We do the busy work to avoid validating early.
Instead of talking to a customer, you’re “building.” Instead of finding the shortest path to getting paid, you find more features to add.
A friend who managed a factory taught me about rotten eggs.
Imagine you run a breakfast shop. An order of eggs arrives. Some are cracked. Some smell foul.
Do you crack them, whip them, cook them, plate them, and serve them to a customer, only to find out they’re rotten?
Of course not! The cost is enormous—wasted time, energy, ingredients, and your reputation.
You reject the bad eggs at the door, when the cost is lowest.
Your startup idea is an egg.
Most are rotten.
Your job isn't to cook it perfectly.
Your job is to smell it first.
I was talking to a founder a while back. Energetic, smart. He wanted to build an AI sports coach app. It would listen to a coach during a game, track player time, and generate individual feedback reports. He’d been working on it for six months. Building AI workflows, designing the website, all of it.
I asked him a question. “How do you validate this by tomorrow morning? You have eight hours.”
He was stumped. The question is designed to make building impossible. You can’t hire enough engineers to ship a product in eight hours. The constraint forces a different kind of thinking. It forces you to find the shortest path to the truth.
So what do you do?
You find a coach. Today. You drive to their practice. You explain what you are tring to do. You ask them to turn on the voice recorder on their phone and just talk. Tell them you’ll have a report for them in the morning.
Then you go home. You listen to the recording. You play it back a hundred times if you have to. You manually create the report on a spreadsheet. It’s clunky. It’s slow. It’s not AI. It's you, acting as the AI.
You've just built a skateboard, not the first wheel of a car.
This one-day experiment compresses six months of risk into a few hours of work:
Maybe the coach refuses. “I’m too busy for that.” Validation: You value proposition failed. Try another pitch or pick at another problem.
Maybe the audio is terrible. Too much wind. Validation: The tech premise is flawed. Do you really want to build a SaaS + hardware startup lol?
Maybe he gets angry during a foul and stops recording midway. Validation: Real-world usage is unpredictable.
Maybe you deliver the report, and he says, “Meh. Not useful.” Validation: The output has no value. Either make it useful or pick another pain.
Or maybe… just maybe.
He says, “This is incredible. Can you come back next week and do it again? I’ll pay you.”
Now you have a business. Not an idea. A business.
You found that out in eight hours, not six months. All because you stopped “building” and started learning.
Your job is not to build your vision. Your job is to find out if anyone else wants it. The fastest path there almost never involves writing code first.
Ps. What are you going to do in the next 8 hours to avoid 6 months of pain?