Sometimes Building Is a Way to Avoid Being Wrong

JAKARTA-Jakartaweekly.com. There is a particular kind of founder who is very good at making things happen.

Give them an idea, and they can turn it into a roadmap, recruit engineers, assemble a team, design an interface and begin shipping features before others have finished discussing the problem.

They are decisive, resourceful and action-oriented. Yet sometimes, they build something the market never wanted.

The problem is not necessarily poor execution. In fact, execution may be their greatest strength. The challenge is knowing when execution is premature.

Building feels productive. Testing feels personal.

A product gives founders something tangible to demonstrate: features to announce, milestones to celebrate and progress to show investors. Testing an assumption is less glamorous. It means speaking to customers who may not care, presenting an unfinished idea that might be rejected and asking questions that could undermine the business itself.

Building allows founders to stay within a world where their ideas make sense. Testing forces them to confront the world outside it.

Sometimes, the urge to build is not evidence of market demand. It is a way to escape uncertainty.

Founders may argue that customers cannot understand a product until it exists. That can be true, particularly when a product’s value depends on an experience that is difficult to explain. But the same reasoning can also become a convenient excuse to avoid discovering whether the problem is significant enough, the customer is right or the solution is worth paying for.

When the Founder Becomes the First Customer

Founders often recognise the potential value of a product long before they have evidence that anyone else sees it.

They can imagine the workflow it will improve, the time it could save and the industry it might transform. They understand how the features fit together because they created the logic behind them.

Customers do not necessarily share that context.

They have existing habits, competing priorities, limited attention and perhaps several imperfect ways of dealing with the problem already. A new product must earn its place in that reality.

A founder can be right about the problem but wrong about the solution. They can identify the right solution but target the wrong buyer. They can understand the buyer and still misjudge how urgently the problem needs to be solved.

An idea can be intelligent, technically impressive and useful to a small group without supporting the business a founder intends to build.

These are different questions, and each requires different evidence. Yet founders often compress them into one broad belief: This is a good idea.

That belief is not specific enough to guide a significant investment decision.

The Cost of Building Too Early

When founders discuss the cost of building prematurely, they often focus on engineering hours. The actual cost can extend much further.

Once a product exists, someone must maintain it, support it, explain it and fix it when something breaks. Teams begin organising themselves around what has already been built. Roadmaps change, expectations form and internal credibility becomes attached to delivery.

If the original assumption proves wrong, stopping is no longer a simple product decision. It becomes an organisational one.

The founder must reconsider the roadmap, explain the decision to the team and potentially disappoint people who believed in the original direction.

A relatively small uncertainty can therefore become an expensive commitment.

The initial mistake is not always choosing the wrong idea. It is allowing an untested assumption to accumulate commitments before it has earned them.

The earlier a founder challenges a critical assumption, the less costly it can be to change direction.

Conviction Is Not Evidence

This does not mean founders should become timid or demand perfect evidence before making decisions. Startups require judgment under uncertainty. Some markets do not exist until someone creates them, and some products only reveal their value through actual use.

There is, however, a difference between accepting uncertainty and refusing to investigate it.

Conviction tells founders where to look. Evidence helps them decide how much to commit.

Instead of asking only, Do I believe in this idea?, founders should ask: What would I need to observe to believe this idea deserves the next level of investment?

The question makes assumptions explicit.

A founder might believe a particular customer group has an urgent problem, that customers will switch from an existing solution or that the problem is painful enough for them to pay for an alternative.

The next step is to identify which assumption would make the investment a mistake if it proved false. That assumption should be investigated before substantial resources are committed to building around it.

The method depends on the risk. It might involve a prototype, a paid pilot, a manually delivered service, a technical experiment or a longer period of customer observation.

The principle remains the same: identify what must be true, then seek the strongest practical evidence available before committing more resources.

Give the Idea a Chance to Fail Early

One useful discipline is to create a deliberate pause between developing an idea and committing engineering resources to it.

This is not an invitation to conduct endless research or spend another month perfecting a pitch deck. It is a focused period in which founders stop asking how to build the product and start asking what must be true for building it to make sense.

Who has the problem? How do they deal with it now? What makes the existing solution insufficient? What would they have to do, rather than merely say, to demonstrate that a better solution matters?

Founders should also determine what evidence would justify proceeding, narrowing the idea, changing the approach or stopping altogether.

The purpose is not to eliminate risk. It is to avoid paying for answers that could have been investigated more cheaply.

This is the thinking behind a structured 72-hour build bet: turning a broad product conviction into one precise demand question and identifying the evidence needed to justify the next commitment.

Not every business decision can be settled in three days. The point is that founders can often learn something important before beginning a much more expensive process.

Sometimes the most valuable outcome is not a prototype. It is a reason not to build the wrong thing.

The Discipline to Change Your Mind

Founders are celebrated for persistence, and rightly so. Building a meaningful business requires resilience. But persistence is an advantage only when it remains connected to the right objective.

A founder can stay committed to solving a problem while changing the proposed solution. They can believe in a market while reconsidering how to enter it. They can maintain a long-term ambition without continuing to fund a short-term assumption that has not earned their confidence.

Changing direction in response to evidence is not a failure of conviction. It is an exercise of judgment.

The founders I find most interesting are not necessarily those who move fastest or build the most. They are those who understand when speed matters, when more information is necessary and when the smartest next step is to hold back resources.

Execution is not automatically progress.

Sometimes progress means discovering that the thing you were ready to build is not the thing worth building.

Clarity is cheaper than execution. The question is whether founders are willing to seek it before the bill becomes expensive.

Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves

• Which assumption am I treating as fact simply because I have believed it for a long time?
• What would I need to observe before committing more time, money or engineering resources?
• Am I moving forward because the evidence supports the next step, or because moving forward feels more comfortable than questioning the direction?

Sometimes the best decision is not to move faster. It is to know what deserves to move fast.

Written By Elisabeth Kurniawan

Edited by Rafael