Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

It’s Pollination season in the land of the pines, which means great outdoor weather - with sneezing. But it also means the 1st quarter is baked.

I’ve spent the past few months on technology, but this week we go back to Launch Key origins: experienced professionals just know stuff.

And it can be the stuff you turn into a product.

Let's get into it.

You've been solving the same problem for decades.

Different companies. Different titles. Same headache — the quarterly reporting process that takes three weeks and shouldn't. The onboarding system that keeps breaking. The vendor negotiation playbook every new manager has to learn from scratch because nobody ever wrote it down

You solved it. Improvised a workaround. Built the spreadsheet. Trained the new hire. Moved on.

Here's what most people never realize: that solution is a product.

Every executive who's built something great in the creator economy will tell you some version of the same story. They didn't find a clever market gap on a whiteboard. They got tired of solving the same problem for free — and decided to start charging for it.

This is the cleanest path to a viable product that exists: build a solution for the person you used to be.

The founder of Jotform built his company for one simple reason: he was a developer wasting hours every week building forms from scratch. He hated it. He fixed it. Millions of users and a nine-figure business later, that frustration became one of the most-used SaaS tools on the planet. The insight wasn't genius. It was boredom.

You've got the same raw material.

Probably more of it. And your experience Is the advantage.

There's a persistent myth that great founders are 23, college dropouts operating on four hours of sleep and pure audacity. The data tells a different story.

Harvard Business Review analyzed 2.7 million company founders and found that the average age of the most successful startup founders — top 0.1% by growth — was 45.

And the single strongest predictor of success? Years of experience.

Not youth, not connections to VC money – industry experience.

The problems you've watched recur across three companies, two industries, and a dozen leadership changes? You're not the only one who has them. You're just the first one who might actually know how to fix them — and who has the pattern recognition to know the fix will actually work.

Here's how to identify your best opportunity. Grab a notebook and answer these questions honestly:

The sweet spot is where two or more of these questions point to the same answer. That intersection is your product idea. That idea is far more important than what tools you use to build it.

Here's the part that never gets talked about enough: you have a built-in unfair advantage when it comes to validating your idea.

Spend a few minutes on AI x.com and the vibe-coding first-time founders don’t know if their target customers actually want what they’re building. You don't have that problem.

You were that customer. For years. You felt the friction, the workaround fatigue, the quiet frustration of tolerating a broken system because fixing it wasn't your job.

Now it can be your entire job.

This doesn't mean you skip validation — it means you start it faster. You already speak the language of your future buyer. You can make ten phone calls this week to former colleagues who are still living with the problem you solved — and get more useful feedback in an afternoon than most founders collect in months.

A lot of people reading this have already solved the problem.

They built the internal tool, the training program, the playbook — for their employer. And somewhere along the way they thought: "This should exist as a real product."

That thought is not a daydream. That's market intelligence.

If you built it, you know it works. If your organization adopted it, you've already seen it get traction. The question isn't whether you have an idea — it's whether you're willing to own it.

Real talk: there's no version of this path that's zero risk.

But there's also no version where your decades of pattern recognition count against you. The corporate merry-go-round taught you everything. The problems it gave you? Those are your first product.

Bet on yourself.

Now go launch something 🚀

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Here’s a completely different take on your career portfolio. Because, don’t we all have a touch of ADHD? 😉

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