Everyone says, "build hard things to win". I disagree. The best founders build meaningful things, even if they "look" easy. As 2025 came to a close, I sat down for an honest review of our year at Horus Labs. It had been a grind: blood, sweat, tears, late nights. Yet the results were underwhelming. Were we just unlucky? After days of brutal reflection, the answer hit me like a brick. We had poured everything into beautifully engineered products... that nobody actually cared about.

The Allure-And-Trap of "Hard Things"

The mantra "if it's not hard, it's not worth building" is everywhere. YC batch lore, endless startup Twitter threads, it's almost treated as gospel. And I get the appeal. Difficulty feels like a moat. Build rockets (SpaceX), frontier AI models (OpenAI), bleeding-edge cryptography—if it's insanely complex, competitors can't copy you quickly, or at all. Some of the greatest companies have indeed won this way. But for every headline success, there are thousands of "hard" projects quietly burning runway on problems that solve nothing real. Crypto is littered with them: hyper-optimized chains chasing marginal performance gains, intricate DeFi protocols with zero users, elaborate zero-knowledge everything that impresses engineers but leaves everyone else cold.

My own wake-up call

I've never pretended to be the smartest person in the room. If I had to pick two words to describe my drive, they'd be egoistical and persistent. For years, my core life thesis was simple: "Do the difficult things to stay ahead of the 99%." I still believe that in many domains. But startups add crucial nuance. Last year, we set out to redefine community building—a decentralized, better-than-Discord platform. We skipped market research entirely. Why? Because the tech sounded fun. Eight months refining architecture, chasing perfection. Launch day arrived... and the market didn't care. Undeterred, we pivoted to another SocialFi experiment. Same pattern: layering on decentralization, AI features, every ego-boosting feature we could find. Nights spent polishing code to flawless standards. Market response? Unbothered, again. It was confusing. We believed in the tech so deeply. But users sadly didn't care about all that. Then came the pivot moment: one morning I realized we'd repeatedly hit the same pain point across our failed attempts, unable to efficiently access liquidity and users on other chains. So I thought, what if we built a simple, elegant solution to that problem—one we felt ourselves and others might possibly find useful too?

Meaningful > Hard

Let me define "meaningful" clearly: a product that solves a deep human need, creates genuine joy or utility, and spreads because people want to share it with others. Products like these are rarely "simple" to build... but even when they are, they still leave impacts profoundly hard to forget. Some classic examples:

1. Craigslist: One of the ugliest, most basic websites ever built. Yet it revolutionized local commerce, jobs, housing, etc by connecting people directly.

2. Airbnb At its core, a straightforward marketplace with photos, messaging, and payments. Anyone with web dev skills could have built v1. The real moat wasn't technical, it was trust and belonging among strangers.

3. Linktree: A single-page link aggregator that sparked the entire "link-in-bio" craze for creators.

Meaningful products are often technically hard, but not all hard products are meaningful. This is even harder to distinguish by technical founders. We think code first, obsess over perfection, over-engineer simple things for ego, chase state-of-the-art everything. But end users rarely care whether you used 10,000 lines of code or 100, the latest cryptography or something simpler. They care about three things: Does it work reliably? Is it secure enough? Does it solve my actual problem?

Spotting Meaningful Problems

In crypto, and increasingly the AI gold rush, we see the inversion constantly. Founders raise millions for the 1,000th blockchain promising +2 TPS, another hyper-optimized DeFi protocol nobody asked for, AI assistants that schedule your morning, niche IP blockchains. Undeniably hard. Undeniably "smart"-looking. But difficulty does not equal utility. So how do you actually find meaningful problems? I don't have a magic formula (if I did, I'd be retired on a yacht). But here are four reliable signals I've learned the hard way:

  1. The DogFood test: Are you building it because it's cool or because it solves a problem you'd be willing to use and pay for?
  2. The excitement Guage: Do people's eyes light up when you describe the problem? I've never seen my employees get excited for anything we've built in the past as they do for @chainrails_io. They move with unbelievable agency, because they genuinely love the product.
  3. It's easier to sell: This ties into the point above. BD/sales becomes so much easier, people are genuinely interested, they sign up on your waitlist, use the unfinished hacky version, are willing to pay for it.
  4. You feel sustained energy: Even when things get rocky, you have this intrinsic fuel and energy difficult to explain.

If three or more of these rings true, you're likely onto something meaningful.

Conclusion

As founders, we're wired to chase ambition and difficulty. But ego-driven "hard" often leads to building elegant solutions in search of problems. Build things with meaning, and everything slowly compounds differently - happier users, organic growth, lasting motivation. I'm still early in this pivot, but the difference already feels like night and day.

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