Every new wave is exciting. It invites imagination. It arrives with so many possibilities to build something the world has never seen.
The internet wave said put everything on a website. The mobile wave said there should be an app for everything. Crypto said make the money different. (I’m still trying to understand what that even meant)
And now AI.
The excitement of a new wave creates a specific pressure for builders… “If I don’t build something now, I’ll miss it.”
Every other post on my timeline is someone shipping an app in a single day, turning an idea into a landing page with a single prompt. But I’m the kind of person who spends an entire weekend over a single slider.
The FOMO is real. It’s affecting me. How do I deal with this intrinsic urge to create something new for this wave?
Most of us, including me… jumped into this world of building/designing because of visionaries like Jobs.
Quotes like these live in our heads.
“If I asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”
“People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Especially around the start of a new wave. We think about them like scriptures. They make us romanticize vision as an act of inventing a need. I think this is where most builders get carried away. Misunderstanding the puck.
Ford and Jobs didn’t dream up new desires. They didn’t “invent” the need to move faster or the need to create, connect, and express. They understood the need. Then invented a better answer. I believe that order matters. When that order is reversed, we end up building things for ourselves… calling it vision.
Jobs didn’t put a puck on the ice. Neither did Ford. The puck was already there. They were able to read its direction better than anyone else. Their genius was in the solution, not in constructing the problem. The solution didn’t come first. The boring part did. Noticing the need. Feeling it yourself. Seeing it in others. How many others? How often? Whether it’s real or something you want to be real… Going to the depths of it. We just quote the vision and often skip the boring part.
(If you want to understand why we skip this part… look up confirmation bias, narrative bias, and the IKEA effect. Warning: You may feel personally attacked and ruin your next product idea. sorry)
Back to the puck. Every wave splits builders into two paths. One starts with the wave itself and dreams up a vision, hoping people will follow. The other starts with people’s needs and uses the new wave to answer them. Not just answer them. Answer them in a way that wasn’t possible before. That’s the key. New waves don’t create needs. They make better answers possible.
Waves create excitement. Needs create products.
Claude Code got the order right. Developers were drowning in repetitive work… a real need.
I think… Products like Humane AI Pin began with, “What if AI understood our surroundings? Let’s put it on the chest.” Fascinating. But that’s a new question. Not an answer to an existing one.
Real needs attract their people almost immediately. Products built around a possibility… struggle to find their people. Sometimes forever.
When there’s a real need, people forgive rough edges. The first iPhone couldn’t even copy and paste. Today, that would trend on X for two days. But back then? People forgave a lot. I think they still do. Love is blind when the need is real.
When there is no need, no matter how beautiful the experience is, it will only feel like a novelty.
This isn’t just a builder’s problem. This applies to designers as well. Design can make something clearer, warmer, and more human. But it can’t create necessity. Also, designers are writing code now. Developers are picking colors. Nobody knows who’s who anymore. I’ve been planning to rewrite my bio for a month now. Designer?! Builder?! The line is blurring. The trap doesn’t care what we call ourselves.
So, before we start skating in a new wave, I think it is wise to ask… is there even a puck? Because skating without a puck is just performance. There’s nothing wrong with performance. Not everything needs to solve a need. I love doing things just for exploration, beauty, novelty. Half my Xcode and Sketch files exist for no reason other than exploration. I just need to be honest about it. Building for exploration and expecting it to be a product is where the heartbreak starts.
With building stuff getting easier than ever, I think knowing what to build and why to build matters more than ever. Every generation of builders forgets this during hype cycles. This is me trying to protect my first principles in a hype cycle.
Trying to remind myself…
Needs are discovered. Answers are invented. Waves are opportunities to answer them better.
Sharing this publicly itself might be an answer to a question nobody asked for. But I enjoyed exploring it. The exploration doesn’t stop. Old habits 😊
