In this week’s episode of the Niche Pursuits podcast, Kevin Surace and I discuss how founders can build better businesses by finding pain points, checking whether buyers will pay for solutions, and timing the market before it changes. The talk remains broad enough to apply to all industries, but is full of concrete examples, hard numbers, and clear lessons for entrepreneurs building online today.
Kevin brings a rare level of credibility to the subject. He is the CEO of Appvance, a long-time AI developer dating back to the 1990s, and an inventor with exactly 95 worldwide patents to his name. He’s spent decades seeing overlooked problems, building products around them, and watching what happens when the market is ready, late, confused, or persistent.
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Pain Points Matter More Than Smart Ideas
One of Kevin’s clearest points is that many companies make products for problems that don’t even exist yet. Worse, some are solving problems for people who care but don’t have the budget to pay for help.
It sounds obvious, but it’s one of the most common mistakes in entrepreneurship. A founder may be deeply convinced that the idea is brilliant, but still miss the more difficult question of whether the intended customer feels enough pain to buy the solution.
Kevin said this issue is everywhere in AI right now. He estimated that while more than 5,000 AI companies have been funded in recent years, perhaps only about 100 will succeed, in part because many lack moats and no lasting reason for customers to choose them.
Here are some filters to choose from:
- Is the problem painful enough to compel action?
- Does the buyer control the money?
- Is the offer difficult to replace?
- Will the customer still be interested six months from now?
This is a stricter standard than asking if an idea sounds interesting.
Curiosity comes before opportunity
At the beginning of the conversation, Kevin linked the creation of the business with interest. His argument was simple: disinterested people stop seeing problems, and people who stop seeing problems stop finding business ideas.
He described curiosity as a daily habit, not a trait limited to school or technical work. This, he says, helps founders see friction that others shrug off, don’t see, or take for granted.
Her upcoming book is also here, Joy Success Cyclebegins to establish a relationship with entrepreneurship. He argues that a mind full of complaints shuts down, while a mind that works with joy remains open enough to discover patterns, pains, and opportunities.
This idea creates a useful habit for founders:
- Watch out for repeated irritation.
- Watch out for awkward solutions.
- Pay attention to where people spend the movement.
- Listen to repeated complaints.
These are often stronger business signals than trending lists or social media chatter.
Some Problems are invisible until the product is available
One of the most interesting parts of the episode is when Kevin explains that customers can’t always describe the product they need. Sometimes they recognize the value only after it appears, and then it becomes difficult to live without it.
He used the iPhone as an example of this kind of change. Before smartphones put the Internet, e-mail, contacts and calendars in a mobile device, people didn’t ask for this exact combination, but now few are willing to give it up.
Kevin made the same point with one of his first AI products. In the late 1990s, his team built Mary, a voice assistant that could read email, check stock quotes, search the web, answer calls and schedule calendar time.
The product solved the problem of moving away from the table once. This is a helpful reminder that founders shouldn’t confuse “customers can’t describe it” with “customers will never want it.”
Timing can make all the difference
If there was one lesson that Kevin raised above the rest, it was time. He cited an incubator study of more than 100 companies that evaluated teams on factors such as talent, experience, money raised and product quality, but the only true measure of success was time to market.
This is a surprising claim because it contradicts the usual founder story. Most entrepreneurs want to believe that execution, intelligence, and sophistication are at the heart of the bottom line. Kevin’s point is that even these strengths can be wasted if the market is too early or too late.
He also added a hard truth from his personal experience. Founders often think they are late when they are still very early. The timing of the signs may still be off:
- Buyers need a lot of education before taking care.
- The team using the product is threatened by it.
- The value is clear to management but rejected by the middle classes.
- The product works, but the incentives are blocking adoption.
This last point was particularly evident in his example of Appvance.
Why Great Products Still Get Rejected
Kevin described how Appvance created an AI script in 2017. He said the system can generate test scripts 10 times more comprehensive than traditional approaches and can find critical bugs that teams have missed for years.
On paper, this seems like an easy sell. In practice, many QA teams resisted because the tool exposed problems they weren’t asked to find, and in some cases made them look bad to management.
Today, he estimates, about 60% to 70% of prospects embrace the idea, while 30% to 40% still hold back because they don’t want the system to make mistakes or call their jobs into question. This section makes one thing clear:
- Product cost does not erase human resistance.
- Not all buyers share the same incentives.
- A better tool can still create fear.
- Domestic politics could slow down a strong bid.
A founder who ignores these forces may misread the market.
Why Going Deep is Expanding
Another main theme was the focus. Kevin argued that early-stage businesses won by digging deep into one painful problem, not by trying to do everything at once.
His QuietRock story gave real weight to this idea. He saw that thin walls caused serious noise problems, so he built a line of soundproof drywall products around that problem rather than trying to create a product unrelated to them.
The economy was amazing. Standard drywall can cost about $10 a sheet, while QuietRock can cost $30, $40 or even $50, but when the alternative involved angry homeowners and possible lawsuits, builders were willing to pay. QuietRock has grown into a billion dollar product line.
This is how the founders of mathematics must love. It’s easy to defend a higher price when the customer sees a higher price on the other side of the problem.
Why Positioning Should Focus on the Buyer’s Outcome
QuietRock also produced one of the best tutorials on product placement. The contractors did not care about the scientific explanation of viscoelastic polymers or bounded layer damping. Builders were concerned about not being sued, and architects were concerned about creating quieter buildings.
This gap is important in every industry. Founders often get so caught up in how a product works that they forget to care more about what happens to customers after purchase. This points to a few useful rules:
- Sell the result, not the mechanism.
- Reduce labor friction if possible.
- Listen carefully to field objections.
- Improve adoption by tailoring to buyer habits.
A strong product is only part of the job. It makes the rest feel easy enough to say yes to adoption.
How AI-First Work Is Becoming the Standard
If the founder isn’t AI-first, the challenger probably is, Kevin said. His AI-first definition was concrete. This means going to Word, Excel, PowerPoint or pre-internet AI and using it at least five times an hour, and some people using it more often.
He described this behavior as a dividing line between the forward and the backward. Kevin also said that he has subscriptions to about 20 different AI tools, which shows how serious he is about his expertise and tool selection.
For online founders, this can translate into:
- Research is done faster
- Drafts improved faster
- Ideas are more quickly tested under pressure
- Documents are analyzed faster
- Weak assumptions are caught more quickly
It’s not a matter of blindly handing over creativity. The point is to build speed, distance and sharper judgment into everyday work.
Consequences thinking transforms creative work
Kevin also touched on a sensitive issue for creators. He argued that many people identify with the process while customers care about the outcome. He sampled the content and music. Either way, he says, buyers aren’t paying per key or per note. They pay for the finished fabric and the result it produces.
This idea may be uncomfortable, but it is in line with the direction of AI tools. Taste, judgement, texture and selection become more important when the production rate increases. For content publishers and solo founders, this likely means:
- Spend less time defending the old process
- Spend more time shaping the angle
- To edit harder
- Improving quality standards
- Focusing on outcomes that customers care about
This change could be one of the biggest business changes of the next few years.
Energy and attitude affect business results
Kevin said the average person complains more than 100 times a day, often in silence, and this pattern draws attention and limits creativity. His solution was simple and memorable: the rule of one complaint a day. After this complaint is used, the rest of the day should be handled differently.
In his book, Kevin argues that success follows joy, not the other way around. Whether or not one agrees with every part of this claim, it fits the rest of the interview, as interest, focus, energy, and opportunity all seem to be closely related to his way of working.
A few final thoughts Kevin would like to convey:
- Curiosity fuels business creation
- Complaining narrows focus
- Energy shapes how problems are detected
- Attitude affects the quality of everyday decisions
This is not soft advice for a founder. It changes the types of work the mind can do.
Final Thoughts
This conversation is the best warning against shallow business ideas. A founder may have energy, talent, and ambition, but lose it by chasing weak pain points, ignoring time, or building something that buyers don’t need enough of.
Kevin’s message is that better businesses start with sharper observation. Find a pain point, determine who will pay to fix it, keep the proposition focused, and use AI as part of the day-to-day rather than as a side tool.
For Internet entrepreneurs, this may be the clearest takeaway from the episode. The market moves fast, but the bottom line is still the same: spot the pain early, clearly define the value of the package, and build something people don’t want to take away.
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