Hey friends👋

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a quiet pattern emerging in conversations with early-stage AI founders.

Many start with a long list of ideas — market gaps, industry opportunities, interesting LLM use cases, clever prompts, and ambitious product visions.

But when it’s time to choose what to build first, almost everyone feels stuck.

What comes up again and again is this:

The products that take off rarely begin as full products.

They begin as one very specific workflow someone struggles with every day.

I didn’t fully understand this until a moment that stayed with me.

A founder was demoing a legal AI tool. Clean UI. Several polished features.
But when he walked me through a real contract review, he didn’t use any of them.

Instead, he kept returning to one specific paragraph — comparing, rewriting, checking, and rechecking.

That small loop — the one never shown in pitch decks — was where the real pain lived.

It was also where the real opportunity was hiding.

And that’s what today’s edition is about: Why starting with one workflow is often the most reliable, scalable, and grounded way to build an AI product — and the deeper psychology behind why it works.

What we’ll cover today:

• Why workflows give you a truer view of user pain

• What users actually want from AI (and why it’s not “automation”)

• Why moments matter more than personas

• A personal shift in thought process that made this clear

• Founder stories that reveal the pattern

• A full workflow walkthrough

• A simple mental model

• A practical playbook you can use tomorrow

Let’s dive in.

— Naseema Perveen

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