The people who like your idea vs the people who'd miss it.

There's a sentence founders collect like trophies: "I love this." It feels like the market is speaking. It isn't. It's a person being kind about an idea, which is a different thing from a person who would be worse off without it.

The last piece was about the fuel — that admiration burns out, and conviction doesn't. This one is about the signal because admiration doesn't just exhaust you. It also lies to you about whether you're onto something. And the lie is specific: it makes liked look like needed.

Liking is abundant. Missing is rare

Liking is cheap because it costs the speaker nothing. Saying "great idea" requires no change of behaviour, no money, no time, no inconvenience. People hand it out freely — to be supportive, to be polite, because the pitch genuinely sounded good in the thirty seconds they gave it. None of that is fake. It's just weightless.

Missing is the opposite. For someone to miss your product, it has to have earned a place in their actual life — a habit, a workflow, a relief they'd notice if it were lost. That place is expensive to win, which is exactly why missing is a real signal and liking isn't. A crowd of likers tells you that you're pleasant to hear about. A handful of people who'd miss you tell you that you matter to someone. Only one of those is a business.

The "would you miss it?" test

So change the question. Stop asking "do people like this?" and start asking "who would feel the absence?" Take the product away — in your head, or for a week, for real — and watch who notices. Who emailed to ask where it went? Who complains. Who builds a clumsy workaround rather than going back to life without it.

The well-worn version of this is Sean Ellis's product-market-fit survey: how would you feel if you could no longer use this? — and you ignore everyone except the people who answer "very disappointed". That's not pessimism. It's just refusing to count the weightless replies. The "somewhat disappointed" and the "it's fine" are the likers. The "very disappointed" are the missers, and they're the only ones whose answer predicts anything.

Why founders avoid the test

Because it's the one question that can come back empty. Liking is always available — you can refill on it any time you present to a friendly room. Missing might not be there yet, and looking straight at that gap is uncomfortable. So the founder quietly swaps the hard question for the easy one, collects another round of "love this", and calls it traction.

That's admiration doing what it does best: protecting you from an answer you're not ready for. And the protection is the trap, because the gap doesn't close while you're not looking at it. It just waits — usually until you've built far more on top of it than you needed to.

What to do with this

Stop counting likers. They're real people and they mean well, but they're not the scoreboard. Find the missers — even a few — and learn everything about them: what they were doing before, what the product replaced, what it would cost them to lose it. Make it indispensable to that narrow group before you try to be likeable to a wide one.

And if the honest answer right now is that nobody would really miss it — that's not a failure; it's the most useful thing you'll learn this month. Don't paper over an empty answer with the admiration you can easily collect. The gap is the work. Naming it is how the work starts.

Which raises the obvious objection: what if you know people will miss it eventually, even though they don't yet? That's where conviction and self-deception get hard to tell apart — and it's why conviction isn't the same thing as certainty.