Twenty years ago I shipped a hack — a JavaScript click tracker — and almost sold it for a million bucks. Things turned out even better, but Christ did we get lucky.
March 2005. I was a four-times-failed blogger trying to do a Jason Kottke-style link blog. And I couldn't believe that in 2005 there still wasn't a decent way to track what people were clicking on.
So I called my best friend Todd. He said hold my beer. A week later his guys handed me three lines of JavaScript. Drop it in the page, it writes a 1-pixel gif on click, the server logs the link. Coolest little hack I'd seen.
We launched it. Nearly got acquired for a million bucks. That deal fell through.
About a year later a total stranger emails us and tells us, "cookies are worth pennies, profiles are worth dollars. You're tracking people all over the web. Have you thought about building profiles?"
And I was like, yeah, We can do that.
We pivoted. Six months later Yahoo wanted to buy us. I wanted to go build the next IGN. My co-founders wanted to take the $12M check. We took the check. Yahoo proceeded to shit all over it. I spent the next ten years publicly trashing Yahoo for ruining my baby.
Here's the part that took me another decade to admit: I didn't have a baby. I had a clever hack and a lucky inbound from a stranger with a better idea than mine.
I didn't have a thesis. I didn't actually understand the market. I had momentum and enthusiasm and a JavaScript snippet.
I was on a call this morning with a founder and she asks me if she should be focused on raising capital because she thinks it's the real path to conviction. She's wondering why she isn't going hard in that direction.
Her subconscious knew something her conscious brain didn't. She doesn't have a thesis. She doesn't understand her market nearly well enough to walk into a room and say, "I know something nobody else in here knows."
She hasn't earned the right to raise.
She hasn't earned the right to scale.
Most founders only figure this out after getting punched in the face. They burn the round, they burn the runway, and somewhere around month nine they go, "oh, shit, I guess I really didn't understand this market."
The rare founder hears "some people want this thing" and decides to investigate more before they double down.
That's not weakness. That's the whole game.
Inbound interest is not a thesis. A clever hack is not a thesis. A pitch deck is not a thesis.
A thesis is a secret about your market that you learned by doing the work.
Go learn.