The market doesn't care about your feelings

Rule number 1: Customer only care about themselves and their needs

I used to think if I worked hard, cared about quality, and made a great product of high quality, customers will come, and I will get rich.

But the market doesn’t care about your feelings.
It doesn’t care about how hard you worked.
It doesn’t care about the ideals you bring to the product.

What customers care about is the value they get. Does it solve their problem? Is it at a price point they can accept?

If—a big if here—the customers happen to care about your hard work, if they happen to enjoy paying for quality, then there’s a fit to your ideals.

But not always. It depends on customers, problem, use case, market, context.

Ultimately, the market doesn’t care about you.
They care about themselves.
The market is what is it.

If people are using your app or playing your vibe-coded game, and buying it despite it looking like “crap”, then the value they are getting is coming from something else.

It could be loyal fans.
It could be influence.
It could be nostalgia.

Maybe you say, I won’t put out low quality stuff. That’s not me. It’s bad for my reputation. It’s not being fair to customer. I wouldn’t build something like that, and yes, there are customers who care about quality in some niches. Then play in those games instead.

But there are customers and markets who don’t care about purist ideals.

The point is, play the tune your customers want.

Play to the rules of the game, not invent your own made-up rules in the game and then whine when you lost.

I know, because I did that, and lost.

But that’s a story for another day.

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