Product-Market Fit in a World Where Everyone Can Code

Every book on building a startup lands on the same lesson: nothing matters until you’ve found product-market fit. Put simply — are there enough customers out there who’ll pay enough for your product to turn a profit?

Airbnb is the story people reach for, and for good reason. As Leigh Gallagher tells it in The Airbnb Story, and in later interviews, the founders didn’t land on their idea in one try. They iterated, found what worked and what didn’t, and kept going until the fit was real. Your first idea might be the right one. It might also be the wrong one wearing the right clothes, and the real business is one pivot away. Either way, that’s the job — not a detour from it.

What’s changed since Airbnb’s early days is the tool in your hand. AI agents can now build a working app in a matter of hours. That’s genuinely remarkable, and it raises a question every builder now has to answer honestly.

If everyone can use AI, why will they buy from you?

There’s an old adage: people buy from people. It still holds. Not everyone wants to be a creator. Not everyone wants to maintain an app once it’s built. Most people, in fact, don’t realise they need something until they see someone else already using it well.

That’s not a threat to solo builders. It’s the opening. When the cost of building drops, the thing that stays scarce is a product that feels effortless, or delightful, or both. More people building means more noise — and more reason for good design to stand out inside it.

A useful way in is participatory design thinking: sit with the people who’d use the thing, and ask what a new default could look like now that the old constraints are gone. If everyone can simply talk to their computer, what would you build for them? If an agent can already do your grocery shopping, what’s the next thing people will want handled for them?

Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the actual brief. The tools have made building the easy part. What’s in short supply now is someone willing to imagine an experience nobody’s built yet — and that’s exactly the kind of thinking a solo builder, unburdened by a big team’s assumptions, is well placed to do.

The Tech Solopreneur Accelerator spends its first two weeks on exactly this — validating the idea and shaping the experience — before a single line of production code gets written.