Created from a single voice note with Agent Craft

Phone calls you didn't plan on having are sometimes the ones that…

Phone calls you didn't plan on having are sometimes the ones that teach you something real. A friend I went to school with and I had been close in grades 10, 11 and 12, then the years did what years do and we fell out of contact. We reconnected recently, one of those small, random collisions that the internet makes possible. We ended up on a call after I finished training one afternoon. What he said stuck with me. He pointed out that most people building right now are solving at the feature level when the real leverage sits one layer up, at the category level, where whole problems are going unaddressed not because the tools don't exist, but because nobody's reached for them yet. Not future tools. Not the stuff that's still in research. The stuff that's available right now, today, that most builders are simply not reaching for. That observation hit differently than I expected, because I'd been thinking about this from the product side. How do you build fast, ship something useful, keep it from being janky, make sure it actually solves a problem people have. But he was approaching it from a different angle entirely. He was thinking about the gap. The content gap, but broader than content. The gap between what's possible and what's being done. And here's the cross-domain thing that I've been chewing on since that call. When you're deep inside building something, you get very good at seeing the problems directly in front of you. You get better at execution, faster at shipping fast features, sharper at knowing what breaks and why. That's not a bad thing. But it does create a kind of tunnel. You stop seeing the category-level gap because you're so focused on the feature-level gap. The person I spoke to hasn't been in the weeds of building the same product I have. He came at it fresh, from the outside. And that outside view surfaced something that I genuinely hadn't framed the same way in months. This is the pattern I've noticed across a lot of the best insights I've picked up over the years. They rarely come from inside the domain you're already working in. They come sideways. A conversation with someone who's building in a completely different space, solving a completely different problem, who asks one question that cuts through all the noise you've been living inside. From my personal experience working with people across different contexts, the most interesting observations have almost never come from technical documentation or research papers. They've come from conversations. Specific ones, with specific people, in specific moments. A catch-up call after training. A message that started with "hey, I saw your post and..." A conversation that was supposed to last ten minutes and went longer because something genuine got surfaced. The practical thing here isn't "talk to more people" because that's too vague to be useful. The more specific version is this: talk to people who are one or two degrees outside your current problem. Not experts in exactly what you're doing. Not the people already in your Slack or your team calls or your investor updates. Find the person who's been building something different for the past year. The school friend you haven't spoken to in a decade who turned out to also be running his own business. The person in a completely different market who sees your problem from a vantage point you genuinely can't access yourself. That's where the category-level insight lives. Not in the weeds you're already standing in. Luckily I've got an old friend who had the good sense to reach out. And luckily I called him back.