Creators lock in their holiday content calendars 90 days out, before most ecommerce brands finalize their commission strategy and way before Black Friday and October deal events.

Get ahead of the seasonal rush with The 90-Day Holiday Sprint, a practical guide for brands that want creators driving holiday demand while competitors are still recruiting:

Your 90-day countdown starts now.

Get the Free Guide

Of course I thought of this while walking to a rose garden.

Very on brand. Slightly dramatic. Honestly, probably the exact conditions required for my brain to have a semi-useful business thought.

Hot take: I think the first one-person billion-dollar company is literally being built right now. I also think something is shiftiiiing. People are starting to do more with less. And if building gets easier, I think for the first time: the advantage isn’t being the best builder.

Maybe it’s being the person who notices the problem first.

A lot of the conversation around AI and entrepreneurship is about leverage. One person with the right tools can now do work that used to require a much bigger team. You can research, write, code, design, analyze, automate, and launch so much faster than before.

And yes, that is exciting.

But I also think it is making us slightly obsessed with the wrong thing.

Because if building gets easier, the ability to build may not be the scarce part anymore. The scarce part is knowing what is actually worth building.

One of my favorite founder stories is the origin story of Venmo. One of the co-founders forgot his wallet while visiting a friend for the weekend. His friend covered him, and paying him back with a check was annoying enough that the frustration eventually became part of the seed for Venmo.

That is such a good story because it was not born from someone sitting in a room saying, “The payments industry needs disruption.”

It was much more human than that: why is this still so annoying?

That is what lived experience gives you. Not an idea in the abstract, but a real moment where something breaks, drags, annoys you, slows you down, or makes you think, “There has to be a better way to do this.”

That’s what freaking matters.

AI can help you build faster than ever. It can help you write code, draft copy, research a market, design a landing page, summarize competitors, and make a prototype before dinner.

But it cannot live your life for you.

It cannot forget your wallet. It cannot sit in the meeting where everyone says the dashboard makes sense even though no one understands what they are supposed to do next. It cannot notice the tiny moment in your own day when something feels heavier than it needs to be.

That is still yours.

I think this hit me because I’ve been using AI to build more lately, and every time I get excited about what I can make, I eventually run into the same question: wait, is this actually solving the right problem?

The tool can help me move faster, but it cannot always tell me whether the thing I’m building deserves to exist.

That part still requires judgment. Taste. Curiosity. A little bit of boredom. A willingness to pay attention to your actual life instead of only studying what everyone else is building.

This week, I saw a Nike ad of someone running on a concrete truck. And it’s so so good.

Nike and running make sense together. That is expected. But running on a concrete truck made me double take.

That is the framework I keep playing with:

What is the expected thing?

And where does it show up in an unexpected way?

Expected: people need to pay for things.
Unexpected: you left your wallet at home and now owe your friend for an entire weekend.

Expected: people need AI tools.
Unexpected: maybe what they actually need is help knowing which problem is worth bringing to AI in the first place.

Expected: people want to build faster.
Unexpected: speed is not that useful if you are solving a problem no one actually has.

This is where I think a lot of us get tripped up. We assume the work is to become more technically impressive. And sometimes it is. I am not saying the tools do not matter. They absolutely do.

But I keep wondering if the better question is much simpler:

What am I close enough to notice?

Not what sounds impressive. Not what would make a great pitch deck. Not what every founder on the internet is suddenly talking about. Yes what (ideally) has a huge TAM but actually what do I keep bumping into in my actual life? What annoys me more than it seems to annoy other people? What do I understand because I have lived it, worked inside it, struggled with it, or watched it break up close?

That is your leverage.

So here is the exercise I’m playing with this week:

What annoyed me recently?

Where did the normal solution break?

What did I assume was “just how things work”?

What would make that moment easier?

Why am I close enough to understand it?

You do not need to answer these perfectly. Honestly, I think the point is to walk around with them for a few days.

Go outside. Bring a notebook. Let your brain be a little bored. Pay attention to what bothers you, what delights you, what feels weirdly inefficient, and what you keep mentioning to friends because you cannot quite let it go.

Most of us try to find ideas by staring at a laptop and demanding that our brains become brilliant on command. I don’t think that is where the good stuff usually starts.

The good stuff starts when you are living your actual life: on a walk, in a meeting, at dinner, trying to pay someone back, trying to explain your job, or using a tool that almost works but not quite.

Maybe the first one-person billion-dollar company is being built right now. Maybe it isn’t.

But I think the better question for the rest of us is not, “Can I build a massive company alone?”

It is:

What problem am I close enough to see?

Because in a world where building gets cheaper, noticing gets more valuable.

And maybe your weird little problem is not a distraction from the work.

Maybe it is the beginning of it.