‘Interesting’ is not traction
What it really means when people like what you've built but don't buy it.
There's a specific kind of stuck that nobody warns you about. It's not "I can't build this." The build is done, or close enough. It's the moment after, when you realise that making something work and knowing what it's for are two completely different problems. One you've solved. The other you've maybe been avoiding.
You don't have to spend long on various subreddits to see people bemoaning how hard it is to get people to buy their tools. Here's a fairly typical post:
"Why Is It So Hard to Get Users for New SaaS Projects These Days?
Many founders can build great products, but getting real customers is becoming harder every month. We're competing with dozens of similar tools, limited attention spans, and platforms full of noise."
The responses to posts like this are telling. They largely focus on going forward and doing more. More marketing. More hours. More watching 'Get your first 100 customers' videos. Some people call this a distribution problem, but more often than not, it isn't. Distribution assumes you have clarity. If what you're putting out into the world isn't yet sharp enough to make the right person think "this is exactly for me," more reach just produces more silence.
Building something fast doesn't answer the questions that actually matter: who specifically is this for, in what situation, and what does it change for them? Not a target market but a real person, in a particular moment, experiencing a difference they can feel.
Yatarth Sepal built an AI tool now doing $41k MRR. He put it simply:
"Your ICP isn't a category. It's one specific human having a bad Tuesday."
He also spent real time validating his own assumptions before he built. That wasn’t just whether people wanted the thing, but whether he understood the problem clearly enough to build the right version of it. That reflection is the part many people skip, because it feels slower than just shipping.
The best founders don't only validate whether people want what they've built. They make sure they understand it clearly enough themselves - including being able to describe, specifically, how it solves a real pain point better than whatever people were doing before.
A quick way to check where you are: these five questions will tell you whether you have a venture that can make money, or a side project that still needs some thinking.
Venture clarity check
Five questions. One sentence each. If you can't answer quickly, that's useful information.
Who specifically gets the most immediate value from what you've built — not in theory, but right now, as it stands?
What were they doing before you came along — and why was that good enough for them?
If the right person landed on your homepage today, would they think "this is exactly what I need" — or "this looks interesting"?
What's the one thing your product changes for them — not a feature, but a felt difference in their day or their work?
If you had to say no to three out of four potential customer types, which one would you keep — and why?
This clarity work isn't a detour, nor is it a sign something went wrong. It's an important step that comes before marketing that makes the marketing actually work. Most people skip it because pushing harder on distribution feels more productive than sitting with hard questions, but it usually isn't.
If you're at this point - you've built something real, but you can't quite see it clearly enough to know what to do next - that's a solvable problem. And you don't have to figure it out alone.