Diary of a CEO #16: What Nobody Tells You About Building Products
Building a product isn’t the hard part. Convincing the world to care is.
That’s where most ideas quietly die—long before launch.
I learned that after years of getting it wrong.
Most people imagine product development as a clean, linear process: you have an idea, you design it, you manufacture it, you launch it, and customers immediately understand its value.
But that version of reality doesn’t exist.
What actually happens is far less predictable. You move forward while constantly second-guessing whether you’re even heading in the right direction. You spend months building something, only to receive a single piece of feedback that forces you to rethink everything. You discover that what you thought was a breakthrough is, at best, only partially useful. And you learn that being technically correct means very little if it doesn’t translate into real-world value.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that customers rarely buy products. They buy solutions.
As founders and innovators, we often become obsessed with features—the technology, the engineering, the specifications, the details. We fall in love with what we’ve built.
But customers don’t care how much effort went into it. They care whether it solves a problem.
That’s a hard lesson when you’ve spent months, sometimes years, building an idea.
I’ve seen technically brilliant products fail, and technically average ones succeed—not because of engineering quality, but because one solved a real problem people were willing to pay for, and the other didn’t.
Another thing nobody tells you is how emotionally attached you become to your ideas.
Every founder believes their idea is special. Every engineer believes their solution is the best. Every creator believes they’ve found the answer.
The market doesn’t care.
It is brutally honest.
Customers don’t reward effort. They reward value.
That’s why feedback matters so much—and why it can be so uncomfortable.
The best product development meetings I’ve ever had weren’t the ones where everyone agreed. They were the ones where assumptions were challenged.
An athlete saying something isn’t working. A customer pointing out a flaw. An engineer questioning the design. A retailer explaining why something won’t sell.
In the moment, those conversations are difficult. In hindsight, they’re invaluable.
Every breakthrough I’ve been part of started with someone challenging what we thought we knew.
Whether it’s a bicycle, a saddle, a piece of performance technology, or a consulting service, the process is always the same: listen, test, learn, improve, repeat.
The companies that survive aren’t necessarily the smartest. They’re the most adaptable. The ones willing to admit they’re wrong. The ones willing to kill a good idea in pursuit of a better one.
That’s harder than it sounds, especially when you’ve invested time, money, and emotion into making something work.
Today, when we develop products at Race Lab or work on projects through Supermond, I try to keep one principle in mind:
The goal isn’t to prove we’re right. The goal is to discover the truth.
Sometimes that truth validates your assumptions. Sometimes it dismantles them completely. Both are valuable, because every failed assumption gets you closer to building something people actually need.
And that’s what nobody tells you about building products.
Success rarely comes from having the perfect idea. It comes from having the humility to improve an imperfect one.
This Week’s Lesson
Don’t fall in love with your product. Fall in love with solving the problem.
What I’m Working On
New Race Lab product development projects
Supermond performance innovations
Gathering athlete and customer feedback
Testing assumptions before scaling ideas
What I’m Thinking About
What’s a product, service, or idea you were convinced would work—but didn’t, and ended up teaching you something important?
See you in Episode 17.
— Raymund Afoakwa
Founder, Raymund Afoakwa Consulting
Co-Founder, Supermond Bikes
