When you get started with an idea, opportunities are endless.

The market is so big, so many products can be built, in so many languages.

As you actually get to build the business, things change.

You realize you lack time, so you need to prioritize the products you work on.

You try to sell your product to a group of people, but they don’t seem too interested.

You discover a regulation that prevents you from operating in a sector. Or maybe, you need to have a special paper to show to be able to talk to your customers.

These things can only be discovered in retrospect.

Hence the importance of acting fast (to understand what kind of roadblocks you might find), instead of relying too much on brainstorming.

Yes, there are things that can be anticipated, but only to a certain point.

Once, a client from a random country will popup, you’ll think it’s a good idea to accept the money from them, only to discover that a tax threshold has been met and you’re in for sending a quarterly tax report to authorities from this jurisdiction, something that you can’t afford to do, because you’re too small.

This is exactly the kind of things that turn endless opportunities - on paper - into less than expected.

It can be explained by several reasons: your limited resources, the market, regulations, physical barriers, cultural differences.

These limitations aren’t a curse though, they’re a gift.

That’s within them that you can find a sweet spot, the product-market fit, when planets are aligned.

Many people will invite you to ignore these limitations, rarely considering the cost of doing so. They will push you stay in a market where there’s no traction because “there might be an opportunity”. Instead of embracing the fact that you can’t sell to everyone and position better the product, they’ll invite you to be as generic as possible, leaving you with a tasteless product.

Opportunities aren’t that many. But that’s a good thing. It forces you to stay concentrated - once you’re “onto something” and avoid wasting your energy on what are essentially distractions (things that look good on paper, but have opportunity costs so big that pursuing them doesn’t make sense).