New Builder’s Dilemma: In a World Where You Can Ship Anything Fast, What’s Still Worth Building?

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Read time: 3 minutes.

Welcome to the 183rd edition of The Growth Elements Newsletter. Every Monday and sometimes on Thursday, I write an essay on growth metrics & experiments and business case studies.

Today’s piece is for 8,000+ founders, operators, and leaders from businesses such as Shopify, Google, Hubspot, Zoho, Freshworks, Servcorp, Zomato, Postman, Razorpay and Zoom.

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Building used to be the hard part. Now, AI tools let you spin up products, automations, and prototypes in a weekend.

That sounds great, until you realise shipping is easy, but getting used and paid is harder than ever.

Why This Feels So Broken

• AI coding tools and app builders let even small teams create full products quickly.​

• The internet is flooded with lookalike tools: another CRM, another outreach bot, another AI résumé writer.

• Many founders are starting to ask: “Just because we can build this, should we?”

How to Decide What’s Worth Building

Before writing code or wiring up prompts, force a few checks:

• Pain: Is this a sharp, expensive problem for someone specific or just a mild annoyance no one will budget for?

• Access: Do you know how to reach the people who have this problem, repeatedly and cheaply?

• Money: Can you see a clear path from “they tried it” to “they pay for it” that isn’t just hope?

If you can’t answer those clearly, you’re not building a product, you’re doing a hackathon.

Build Deep, Not Just Fast

• Tools that win now either go very deep in a niche or own a critical horizontal workflow.

• Shallow “AI wrappers” will keep getting crushed as models get better and platforms fold those tricks into their core.​

AI has removed the excuse of “hard to build.”

The new skill is choosing something hard enough to matter and focused enough to win.

That's it for today's article! I hope you found this essay insightful.

Wishing you a productive week ahead!

I always appreciate you reading.

Thanks,
Chintankumar Maisuria