Introduction
The barrier for entry to building a product that serves real life value has never been any lower. AI tools, like ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code, and more need no introduction. Software and hosting is cheap, and with only $20 a month in hosting costs, anyone can bootstrap their way into building a real business. So the question is… why isn’t everyone doing it? How does one channel their energy into building something that people love?
Speed and Exponents
The phrase “You can just do things”, while a twitter meme, is a genuinely important thing to remember in one’s daily life. It is the realization that permission to start things is a concept that has been artificially ingrained in you, and that there really are no “pre-requisites”. Everything can, and should be learnt on the fly.
This, on its own, is nothing new. For decades this is how young entrepreneurs made business, however, with AI it has reduced the bar by orders of magnitude! Gone are the days of sitting with textbooks, sitting through ground up learning, scouring and waiting for niche information, when not only is the world’s information at your fingertips, it is in the format tailored to you.
The primary value extraction that anyone should be looking for with any kind of AI tool, is to increase your speed of execution by the exponents.
Those who force multiply the hardest will win the race.
Blossoming Where You’re Planted
“Blossoming Where You’re Planted” is an ideology echoed by the likes of Naval Ravikant, Harsh Mariwala, and more.
Naval and Harsh both understood the same truth: forcing yourself into someone else’s game is a losing strategy. Everyone has natural strengths, certain combinations of interests, skills, and weird obsessions that make them unique.
The problem is most people never discover theirs because they stop exploring too early. Your childhood was spent trying everything: sports, instruments, clubs, hobbies. That wasn’t wasted time, it was the search. But most people stop searching the moment they enter college or get a job. They pick a path and commit before they’ve actually found their fertile ground.
If you knew your next success is 100 failures away, how fast would you want to fail? Most people fail slowly, over decades. The smart ones compress those 100 failures into months by trying more things, faster. Your job as a young entrepreneur is to increase your failure velocity until you stumble into something that feels like fun.
“You can’t compete with someone who is having fun” – Dhravya Shah, CEO @ Supermemory
The Playbook
While the above discussed topics are general ideas, you don’t need to find yourself first before building a startup. Building a startup IS how you find yourself. Especially as a student, what are the steps one can take to not only find themselves, but build something of value?
1. Get Outside at Every Opportunity: It is easy to get drawn into digital worlds, hear the opinions of those with no skin in the game, and have a distorted vision of reality. It then is imperative for one to get out of the house at every opportunity they get.
To meet humans, to meet those who have travelled the world before them, and to be curious about everyone they meet. Without this, you live in your own fabrication of reality.
2. Be Discoverable Online: Luck is a mutable variable, and it depends entirely on the surface area you provide. Having an online presence, is just as important as finding oneself. After all, what good is a diamond in the rough if it is not dug up. Does a tree falling in the forest make a sound if nobody is around to hear it?
It then is imperative to not fall for the lies of the content mafia, telling you that quality matters over all. The reality is quantity far outweighs quality, beyond a certain minimum bar.
Whether this be Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn or X, post multiple times, every day.
Your quality does not matter if nobody sees it.
3. Find Your Intersection: Value in the world is generated by people who move the needle at the intersection of professional fields. These are the places where one creates 100x the value existing teams do. Rare combinations create monopolies. Some examples include:
– Business x Deep Tech: Business folks *in general*, do not understand deep tech, and vice-versa. A single individual understanding both can move the needle 100x more than anyone else. Eg: Paul Graham, Marc Andreessen.
– Design x Engineering: Having good taste is a skill with exceptionally disproportionate returns. The ability to design something that people like, making it, and selling it, puts people in exceptionally rare positions to create impactful business values. Eg: @jackfriks on X, who scaled post-bridge to $10k MRR organically.
4. Find your Blue Ocean: A startup is fundamentally built on an insight. An insight that the founder has, that nobody else does. Something you can scream from the top of the roof and have nobody listen to you. The objective, then, is to learn something that others don’t. In 2025 alone, more blue oceans exist than ever before as unknown doors have unlocked. All it takes is for the right person to open them.
Your goal should be to explore as many intersections as possible, keep trying to solve problems, until you find one that solves a problem only you can solve.
A river of money is flowing, with AI. How do you build a net to catch it? These four steps aren’t sequential. You do them concurrently, messily, and do them embarassed. But you do them. Now is always the best time to start.
Conclusion: It All Comes Down to Grit
Showing up is all it takes. Show up, every day. Show up for something. Work on something. As long as one shows up every day, to solve one problem or another, through feedback and throwing yourself out there, you will find the right path ahead.
You will fail, stumble, and falter, but keep your ears close to the ground, and you will find your fertile soil to blossom in.