The Compass

There’s a question I keep coming back to. Not because it’s clever — because it’s almost unfairly reliable.

How can I create something that genuinely makes someone’s life better?

That’s it. No framework, no decision matrix, no weighted scoring rubric. Just that. And if you start there — really start there, not as a line in your pitch deck but as the actual origin point of what you’re building — you almost never end up in the wrong place.

It sounds too simple. That’s the tell.

The reason it sounds too simple is because we’ve been trained to distrust simplicity. The corporate machine doesn’t run on simple questions. It runs on manufactured complexity — creating problems that don’t exist so it can sell solutions nobody needs at prices nobody can pay. That’s the loop. That’s the entire operating model of half the companies in the Fortune 500. Invent the anxiety, productize the cure, extract the margin. Repeat until IPO.

And the gravitational pull of that machine is enormous. It warps everything around it — including you, if you’re not careful. It’s why founders start building for investors instead of users. It’s why teams chase DAUs like they’re a measure of value when they’re actually a measure of attention capture — and those are very different things. It’s why the first question in so many product meetings is “what can we build with AI?” instead of “whose life can we improve?” One of those questions is about capability. The other is about purpose. The distance between them is where most products go to die.

The compass protects you from all of it.

When you start with a person — a real person, with a real problem that makes their day harder than it needs to be — the bullshit falls away fast. You stop optimizing for metrics that don’t map to meaning. You stop building features because a competitor shipped them. You stop chasing trends and start chasing impact. The question acts as a filter, and the filter is ruthless.

This isn’t anti-optimization. I believe in doing more with less — that’s the whole game. But there’s a difference between efficient and extractive. Lean is a virtue. Lean in service of making someone’s life better is a superpower. Lean in service of making a number go up on a dashboard nobody looks at is just theater with a burn rate.

Here’s what I keep coming back to. There’s a feeling — and if you’ve built something people actually use, you know exactly the one I mean. It’s the moment you watch someone interact with what you made and you see it land. Not the polite nod. Not the “oh, that’s cool.” The moment where something shifts in their face because the thing you built actually helped. Actually made their day a little lighter, a little easier, a little more theirs.

That feeling doesn’t generate satisfaction. It doesn’t generate success. It generates meaning. And meaning is the thing you can’t manufacture, can’t fake, and can’t find by optimizing for anything else.

So why don’t more people start here? Because “make someone’s life better” doesn’t fit neatly into a pitch deck. Because the incentive structures of venture capital and corporate America measure value extraction, not value creation. Because the machine rewards complexity and punishes clarity. Because starting with a simple question feels naive in a world that worships sophistication.

But the people who build things that last — the ones who create products that become part of someone’s daily life, not just their monthly subscription — they all started with some version of this question. Not because they were idealists. Because it works.

The compass doesn’t care about your TAM slide. It doesn’t care about your competitive moat or your go-to-market strategy. It asks one thing: does this make someone’s life genuinely better?

Start there. The rest follows.