Robert TaFounder & CEO, Clarity · Building Hyper-Personalized Agents

Your Real Competitor Isn't Who You Think

24 Mar 2026 · 1 min

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1:10

In this short talk, the speaker recounts an AI founder event where technical founders were building products for months without speaking to any customers, relying instead on AI‑mined market signals. He argues that market signals are not the same as understanding the actual "jobs to be done" by users. Using the historical example of TurboTax, he explains that the real competitor was not other tax software but the widespread use of Excel spreadsheets for tax and accounting tasks—a insight that only emerges from direct customer conversations. The core message is a call to action for founders: validate ideas by interviewing real users rather than depending on indirect data signals.

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It was kind of wild. I was at an AI founder event last week and I was talking to some founders more on the technical side and they were just building stuff for 6 to 8 months before even talking to a single customer. And they were talking about it. They could use AI to mine data out there on the internet to get market signal. Not a bad idea, but there's a very big difference between market signal and that is very different than what does the actual developer who has to maintain security tools for their job, what do they have to do every day? What are their jobs? Jobs to be done. A really great example is back in the day before TurboTax was really, really big, the CEO asked in all hands, who's our biggest competitor? And there were many other tech startups thrown out there, tax solutions thrown out there, H&R Block, etc. And then when it came down to it, the actual competitor is that most of the market still uses Excel spreadsheets for their taxes in their financial accounting. You will figure that out if you talk to the customer and not just look for market signals. Look for a person with a problem that you can provide a potential solution for. That's the basis of building a good product. So the key takeaway is go and validate your ideas by talking to customers.