your gut is one data point

on wednesday i taped an episode with a pricing advisor. he's spent more than twenty years building businesses that support entrepreneurs, and now he helps investor backed b2b software companies price around what their product is worth to the customer.

he started somewhere unusual for a software guy. creative professional services. and in that world one rule ran everything... nothing got built until the customer asked for it and committed to pay.

no ask, no build. no commitment, no work.

think about how strange that sounds to a software founder. no roadmap built on hunches. no feature because a competitor has it. the customer's commitment was the starting gun.

then he moved closer to the startup world and it surprised him. it still does. founders pour money and months into product before they've found a customer. pricing comes last, after the thing is built, as a number somebody picks for a slide.

his hypothesis is that years of easy venture money bent the path. when capital is everywhere you can build for a long time without anyone paying you. and habits outlast the conditions that made them.

then he said the line that became the title. founders go by gut. and gut is just one data point.

i love that because it isn't anti-instinct. your gut matters. it's how you saw the opportunity in the first place. but it's one vote. it's not a market.

the trouble is gut gets louder the longer you build. every week you put into a product, the more you need it to be right. so you start hearing yes in every polite nod. a friend says cool idea and it ends up in the deck as validation.

a data point you can count looks different. someone with a budget says yes, this is what i'd pay, tell me when it's ready. one of those is worth more than a hundred cool ideas.

if you're building something cool with no strong connection to the market, his advice is to stop. talk to people. find out who'll buy it before you finish it.

a hobby is fine. building something because you love building it is fine. but a profitable business is a different question, and the only person who can answer it is a customer with a budget.

so why do founders build first? my guess... building feels like progress and talking to buyers feels like rejection. code doesn't say no. a buyer can. so we stay in the workshop where it's warm.

it's like opening a restaurant without ever cooking for a stranger. your friends love the food. your neighbours love the food. none of them paid.

the move is to put a price in front of someone before the product exists. describe what it does, say what it costs, and see who commits. a survey tells you what people think. a commitment tells you what they'll do.

his other point stayed with me too. paying customers are the most valuable thing a founder has. that was true in 2003 and it's true in 2026.

long term this matters more, not less. ai makes building cheap and fast. you can ship something that works in a weekend now. which means the build was never the hard part, and it gets easier every month. the hard part is the conversation with someone who'll pay. founders who skip it will just build the wrong thing faster.

if you want help working out who buys and at what price before you build, that's what we do here.

so look at what you're building right now. who outside your team has committed to pay for it... and if nobody has, what are you waiting for?