Specialist insight · Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Building got easier. Knowing what to build didn't.
The biggest change over the last few years isn't that products are easier to launch. It's that the bottleneck moved somewhere else.
Why this matters
A pattern I've noticed while reading founder stories and watching solo builders ship faster than ever.
The story
Context
Every few weeks I see someone launch a product in a weekend. A few years ago that would've sounded impressive, now it feels normal. What's interesting is that most of these products still struggle for the same reasons products struggled before. Not enough people want them, Not enough people hear about them, Not enough people come back. The building part got dramatically easier. The understanding part didn't. The founders I keep seeing succeed aren't necessarily the fastest builders, they're usually the ones who spent years around a problem before trying to solve it- A recruiter building recruiting software. A marketer building marketing tools. A designer building something for designers. From the outside it looks like they found a good idea. In reality, they accumulated context for years. The product is often just the final step.
Takeaway
If shipping has become cheap, domain knowledge has become more valuable. The advantage isn't building faster BUT It's seeing something worth building before everyone else does.