The AI market is hot. Every week there’s a new model, a new “agent,” a new demo that looks like magic. You can ship a slick prototype in a weekend, slap “AI-native” on the landing page, and get attention.

Attention is cheap right now.

Demand isn’t.

In a hype cycle, novelty creates motion without creating pull. You’ll see it everywhere: flashy “ask your PDF” chatbots, one-click agents that crumble on real edge cases, and wrappers that feel impressive until the second session.

At the same time, a few products break through and stick. Not because they’re the most advanced. Because they land on a pain that people already feel, weekly, under stress.

1) Pain Is a Job That Pulls, Not a Feature That Pushes

Novelty pushes features at users. Pain pulls solutions out of them.

A real product starts where the job-to-be-done already exists:

  • a workflow people already do
  • a workaround they already tolerate
  • a cost they already pay

So the first question is not “Is the tech exciting?”

It’s:

Is the job-to-be-done real, urgent, and emotionally charged?

Emotion is not fluff. It’s priority. People feel emotion when something threatens an outcome: a deadline, revenue, reputation, safety, sleep. If the best description of your product is “cool,” you’re likely selling a toy.

Trendy contrast:

  • Positive: AI coding copilots that reduce the “blank page” tax and make engineers meaningfully faster in daily work. The pain is immediate: context switching, slow iteration, constant micro-decisions.
  • Negative: “AI startup idea generators” that people try once, smile, and never open again. No urgency. No consequence.

2) “Underserved” Often Looks Small Until It’s Obvious

The best early markets often look unglamorous because they’re messy, niche, or operational. Or they’re newly arising because the world changed and old workflows no longer fit.

Ask:

Is it underserved, niche, or newly arising in this era?

A modern AI-flavored example: compliance, security review, and internal approvals are getting harder as teams ship faster. The pain is not sexy, but the stakes are real. When the environment shifts, yesterday’s tolerable friction becomes today’s bottleneck.

Trendy contrast:

  • Positive: AI-assisted workflows that help teams handle repetitive, high-stakes operational steps (triage, classification, routing, verification) where accuracy and auditability matter.
  • Negative: “AI personal homepages” that generate pretty text nobody maintains. Nice to have. Not a job.

Market size is downstream. Pain sharpness is upstream.

3) Follow the Money, the Time, and the Risk

People lie politely. Their calendars don’t.

So don’t ask for opinions first. Look for existing payment, even if it’s hidden payment.

Are people already paying time, money, or risk to fix it?

Signals you want:

  • a human hired to do it manually
  • a Frankenstein workflow stitched across five tools
  • a brittle internal script someone “owns” as unpaid labor
  • recurring firefights
  • risk accepted because “we can’t deal with it right now”

In AI, this is the difference between products that become a budget line and products that become a novelty tab.

Trendy contrast:

  • Positive: Meeting-note tools that don’t just transcribe, but reduce the real tax: follow-ups, missed decisions, scattered action items. When done right, they save time that people can feel the same day.
  • Negative: “AI customer support bots” that deflect tickets by hallucinating. They reduce cost on paper and increase risk in reality.

Time is currency. Risk is currency. Stress is currency.

4) The Best Pain Is Often Invisible and Fragmented

Some of the strongest pains don’t look like “a big problem.”

They look like a thousand paper cuts.

Ask:

Is the pain fragmented across small frictions and therefore invisible?

Invisible pain hides inside routine:

  • copy-paste labor
  • manual reconciliation
  • approvals chasing
  • repeated cleanup
  • unclear ownership
  • “quick fixes” that become permanent

The opportunity is not to build a fancy interface. It’s to remove an ongoing tax and replace it with a reliable outcome.

Trendy contrast:

  • Positive: Tools that collapse multi-step workflow glue into one consistent path, especially in ops-heavy environments (recruiting pipelines, sales ops, finance close, incident response).
  • Negative: AI “life coach” apps that give pretty advice but don’t change behavior because they’re not anchored to a real recurring job.

5) Recurring Pain Beats Momentary Curiosity

Novelty spikes usage once. Pain sustains usage.

Ask:

Is it recurring rather than momentary curiosity?

A quick mental model:

  • curiosity gets sign-ups
  • pain gets retention
  • pain plus trust gets renewals

In a hot AI market, you can mistake early attention for product-market fit. But if the job isn’t recurring, your usage graph is just the hype curve.

Trendy contrast:

  • Positive: Tools people open every day because the work hits them every day (drafting, coding, triage, scheduling, analysis).
  • Negative: “Turn any website into an agent” demos that break the first time the UI changes.

6) Proximity: Can You Feel the Pain, Not Just Describe It?

Founders often build from abstraction: personas, decks, market maps.

Pain lives in reality: messy data, half-broken processes, weird edge cases, human hesitation.

Ask:

Are you close enough to your earliest users to feel it directly?

Close enough means:

  • watching the workflow end-to-end
  • seeing where they stall
  • hearing what they complain about when they’re tired
  • noticing what they don’t even mention because they’ve normalized it

Distance creates theater. Proximity creates truth.

7) The Brutal Test: Who Would Be Upset?

Here’s the question that ends the debate:

If the product disappeared tomorrow, who would be upset?

Not “who thinks it’s cool.” Not “who would tweet it.” Not “who would say nice things in a call.”

Who would feel operational pain on Monday morning?

Name the role. Name the moment. Name the consequence.

If the answer is vague, the product is optional. If the answer is specific, you’re holding something real.

8) What This Means in a Hot Market

In an AI boom, novelty will keep getting cheaper. Demos will keep getting prettier. “Capabilities” will keep inflating.

Pain will stay stubborn.

That’s why pain is the better compass. It forces you to anchor on a job, a user, a workflow, and a stake. It keeps you honest when the internet is rewarding shininess.

Start with pain, not novelty.

If you do that, you’re not competing on who can ship a demo fastest. You’re competing on who can remove a real tax from someone’s life and make the result dependable.

And that’s the kind of product people don’t let go.



— Chao Zhou