Every founder I coach is staring at some AI competitor that hit $10M ARR in four months and asking what they're doing wrong. The answer is usually: nothing. Look at year two.
I had this exact conversation yesterday with a founder I work with. His team had just landed #3 on Product Hunt against 1,072 other launches that day. Third place. And he was beating himself up because it didn't translate to the traffic he saw a year ago when companies in his space were launching.
Meanwhile, he can rattle off a bunch of AI companies that leapt to $10M ARR in a few months. "What the hell am I doing wrong?"
Nothing. He's doing nothing wrong.
There's an old VC phrase that I love: pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land.
Six Apart did not win the socials. Facebook did. Alta Vista didn't win search. Google did. Napster didn't win streaming music. Spotify (and their new ugly-ass logo) did.
The AI products that did the crazy year-one spike? Look at year two. Most of them have horrific churn. They got lucky in an uncontested market, raised a pile of money, and now they're watching users walk out the back door faster than they can bring them in the front.
VCs have started to figure this out. Don't look at the initial rise. Look at what happens when actual competitors show up.
You ARE the competitor. You are not getting the gift of being first through the door with everyone staring at you. That gift comes with bleeding out nine months later.
So fine. Win the other way.
Be better. Be merciless about promotion. Know exactly who you're talking to and talk to them incessantly. The founder I'm coaching has a product that's objectively better than the ones doing 10x his revenue. His problem isn't the product. His problem is that not enough of the right people know it exists yet.
That's a fixable problem. It's just slower than getting struck by lightning.
Stop comparing your month six to someone else's month six when their month eighteen is going to look like a graveyard.
Go do the work.