When we were building Jamie, an AI note-taking application, in 2022, there was a lot of talk from investors, other founders, and the press about how building "ChatGPT wrappers" was doomed to fail. People were saying that building at the application layer was challenging because it offered a small moat from a technological and product perspective. The common doubt we encountered countless times was that it was impossible to compete with big players like Zoom, Google, or Microsoft building their own native AI note-taking solutions.
All this talk led us to worry a great deal and overthink what we were doing. Luckily, we stuck to our plan and continued building from the problem we knew millions of people had: writing manual meeting notes. We largely ignored all that noise and competition and just focused on building something people wanted. As we were building for ourselves, we knew what to build best. We knew our customers better than anyone.
Fast-forward two years, and we are now serving thousands of users globally with healthy ARR and a solid path grounded in the work we've been doing to sustainably grow our company into the future. If we had taken what everyone was saying as truth in 2022, we wouldn't have made it to where we are today.
What this story taught me is that you need to recklessly ignore noise. The press, the VCs, the founders—people in the technology ecosystem—all of them are herd animals. The moment one seemingly interesting idea or perspective spreads, everyone merely copies that perspective without scrutinizing it against the ground truth, leading to a fictional perceived reality if you treat people's talk as signal instead of what it really is: noise.
When you're building a company, or any creative project of this sort, you need to learn to ignore noise. You need to develop an instinct to gather ground truth and reach your own conclusions instead of merely adopting external opinions because they seem "credible." Ignoring noise allows you to focus on what actually matters: the work at hand, building something people want. And this is what it's all about.