Build It Anyway

Using Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations to Prove It

You have an epiphany. You’re sitting, sipping coffee, and you connect some dots. You figure out no one else is solving this exact problem.

You figured the world has being doing it wrong, all along. Everyone is stupid, everyone needs this in their lives to improve. Great. This is a good start, great start rather. I love this energy, in fact any energy where are the vectors pointing in the direction of your idea being implemented and distributed is good, cause there will be many vectors pointing in the other direction too.

I’ve lived most of the past decade thinking of building something or building something. There’s not much in between there. Sometimes I’ve spent a month of my life to build something only to be used by a total of one numero uno individual: me.

It’s not that bad. People will be studying to get into colleges, studying in college, prepping for interviews or adding bullet points to their resume, while you go do something which might increase entropy in your life.

I will eventually try come to the point of proving it to you why building might still be worth it. Some back of the envelope calculation might help-

I met a person last year, she is in her mid 40s I guess, she works in a company where they help you get SOC2 more efficiently, and her quota for the year is 15 million dollars. Just hers. 15 million dollars of SOC2 compliance, with each company spending between 30-100k to get their certification with an estimate of 50k per company it’s 300 companies she has to find and make sure her company uses them. If you know or have ever tried sales through cold or warm leads, the numbers are like less than 1% conversion for cold leads and maybe 4% if you’re Joe Girard. Okay, this example maybe irrelevant, this is a service. But is it? You can build anything a service company, a product, a song, build a fix for your German car leaking oil every fortnight, a demand of SOC2, a city of hypervigilant tech enthusiasts.

I’ve worked with insurance agencies trying to optimize every sales trick in the book to sell life insurance, and when they can’t sell anymore they will buy smaller firms and grow. Why are they growing you ask? They must think it’s good value they are creating, maybe. But the founder told me he is just waiting for a bigger fish to acquire him so he gets a 30 million dollar windfall and he can retire at a ripe age of 37 and drive his 911.

There was cache invalidation in CPU’s, now that issue because of latency in LLM’s has translated to AI too. I’ve been trying to take most latency issues specially in memory and frame it as form of cache invalidation issue. Extremely lucrative, lot of people have realized it, some haven’t, it will be needed but that’s another problem which builders do, they stay within their network for feedback, which is your cache of people who know you too well, they know the world a little worse and the market not at all.

There are still people in 2026 bulding AI wrappers, fundraising for plain Jane B2C products, acting with no moat and building with the conviction of the tiniest sliver of problem they think they can solve, with products not working they perhaps don’t know how to make it work, but they are still doing it.

There’s Mr. Musk building rockets with 30 billion revenue and an valuation of 2T$(pre-IPO time) , that is 65 times revenue. He perhaps can demand those multiples because of few sentences of line english written beautifully concisely to show why he is building i.e. his vision statement.

Maybe I’ve been harsh, I’ll change the tone of where this is going. Any development is good. I wanted to talk about this innate quality in humans where they can’t understand fathom scale. Numbers get bigger their thinking starts hitting a wall.

They can’t fathom how fast computers are. They can verbally throw around saying million, billion, trillion but it would take them a minute to write down the orders of magnitude.

Like a million seconds is 11.5 days, a billion seconds 31.7 years and a trillion is 31700 years.

When I was working with my LLC, in the moment I thought selling and scaling will be so hard, looking back it wasn’t the worst. I think the timing, tech, and value prop all had aligned. I had shared with 5 people what I was building 2 came back to me with work. I made 40 cold calls, I got 3 really really interested people. This is one city I lived in, where I didn’t scratch the tip of the iceberg to sell. Sure there is a lot of other things you do for custom outbound with emailing personalized solution which perhaps takes effort and not only will there be no lead generated from that, the lack of feedback can dampen your spirits.

Consumption comes naturally, creation should too. The barter system has been working since the 6000 BC because people play their role in building.

It feels like every fortnight my brain comes with an idea, my way of how the world should move, most get put in my Notion doc ‘Stuff to make’, but before getting put there I usually speak about it with multiple people, most say whose gonna use this, guess what that person hasn’t even understood what your vision is completely maybe you haven’t learned the way to articulate to the way it’s needed for people to scoop it up, but regardless most critique you’ll hear will reject the idea and be like don’t waste your time. Well, I’m not a fan of negative energy, but that is why I’m writing this article to maybe put into perspective how big the market truly is.

NVIDIA is the biggest company in the US by market cap, it does some 80 billion dollars in revenue(2025), it has more than 70% profit margins it keeps on growing, but the way world is moving do you really think if you build good GPUs there won’t be demand for it? Meh maybe not, “why build it when you can’t compete with NVIDIA”.

The point is there is demand, there is more demand than you and whatever conglomerate you plan to make can fulfill so that should never stop you from building. Well, maybe don’t build a Rube Goldberg machine but some people might find it funny and could shell out for quirky things like that.

There are 36.2 million small businesses in US, maybe in that 30 million are just sole proprietors which you think might be crazy but go check the articles of declaration (doc to incorporate your LLC) of your state and see how many LLC’s get formed daily. The remaining 6.2 million businesses are companies with less than 500 employees.

You don’t need to boil the ocean down to get clients, if you can charge 2000 businesses $500/month (there are now redundant IT services company which still charge 5k a month for email spam whatever), so we have come to 12 million dollars in revenue which is 0.03 of that 6.2 million figure. I’m going to just leave you with this thought, 99.97% of people can find you wrong and you’ll still be doing great.

Actually no last thing, if you thought “whose gonna buy” and that’s why I won’t build you were wrong. What you’re trying to build people are definitely buying, but will they buy yours is the question but that is just a craft/product problem which is very solvable unless you’re Theranos. Build it anyway!