Serge Punchev

You can vibe code a product in hours. You can't vibe code a strategy.

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Seeing this pattern repeat with technical founders everywhere right now. Curious if it's just me or you're noticing it too:

AI tools made building insanely fast. A solo founder can ship a functional SaaS in a weekend. But the failure rate hasn't dropped -it's just that founders fail faster now. They build something technically solid, get to $2-3K MRR, and flatline. Not because the product is bad. Because the strategy never existed.

A founder I know had this exact problem. Clean codebase, good UX, reliable infrastructure. Six months in - barely any users, revenue stuck. He stopped building and spent a few weeks doing nothing but questioning his own assumptions. Three things changed everything:

  1. His "target customer" was an entire industry, not a person. Once he narrowed to a specific segment that had an urgent daily problem, everything clicked.

  2. Users were signing up but leaving in 14 days. Not a product problem - an onboarding problem. The value was buried three sessions deep. Nobody stuck around long enough to find it.

  3. Three competitors owned the generic market. But one niche was completely underserved and actively searching for a solution.

Two months later he went from $3K to $75K MRR. Didn't change a single line of code. Changed who he was selling to and how fast they got to the "aha moment."

The uncomfortable truth: in 2026, knowing how to build is table stakes. Knowing what to build and for whom is the actual competitive advantage.

Curious -how many of you shipped something technically great that went nowhere because the strategy was off?

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