As founders of a company in the developer tooling space, something we keep noticing is that ideas and the realization of problems have their own rhythm. You can't force insight. You can't schedule the moment when a scattered set of observations suddenly clicks into a coherent understanding of what needs to be built next. It just happens when it happens, and the best you can do is stay close enough to the problem space that you're ready when it does.
This feels counterintuitive in an era where everything is supposed to move fast. AI has accelerated so many things that we've internalized speed as a default expectation. But there are dimensions of building a company that move at their own pace no matter how much pressure you apply. Understanding a domain deeply, earning the trust of the people you serve, developing the intuition to distinguish real problems from manufactured ones. These things take time. Money doesn't buy you shortcuts here.
The manufactured urgency
I've watched many companies in our space try to skip this process. They raise capital, and then they deploy it into making their name impossible to ignore. Conferences, sponsorships, content marketing at scale, all designed to create the impression that a problem is more urgent than it actually is. They amplify pain points beyond their real severity. They manufacture needs that developers didn't have until someone told them they should. They create a FOMO-driven, social-pressure approach to adoption: everyone else is using this, so you should too.
This is very common in our industry, and I don't think it happens because founders are cynical. I think it's the natural consequence of aligning a product with investor expectations that lean heavily toward succeed fast or die fast. When your investors need returns on a specific timeline, and when that timeline doesn't align with the natural rhythm of your market, you start forcing things. You push growth before the product is ready. You manufacture demand before the need is organic. You optimize for metrics that look good in board meetings but don't reflect whether you're actually helping anyone.
And if you're being honest about the incentives, many founders want this too. Build something, grow it fast enough to raise at a higher valuation, exit in a few years with a good story for your profile and a meaningful deposit in your bank account. This is a well-trodden path, and I understand why people take it.
But here's what nobody talks about: developers notice. They can tell when a product is being pushed at them versus when it's genuinely solving a problem they have. They can sense the difference between a company that cares about their workflow and one that cares about conversion rates. You'll never hear about this publicly because the industry celebrates exits regardless of how they were achieved. Everyone claps. Everyone congratulates. The narrative is always success, never the developers who felt pressured into adopting something they didn't need.
The slower path
We could take that path with Tuist. We could raise capital, throw it at growth, put our name on every conference and every newsletter, and ride the wave. It would be the easier route in many ways.
But we're building a long-term company, and I think that kind of company requires a different relationship with time.
It takes time for ideas to emerge. Not surface-level product ideas, but the deep understanding of where your domain is heading and what people will actually need when they get there. It takes time for people and organizations to build meaningful connections with you, connections rooted in trust rather than marketing exposure. It takes genuine love for your domain space and a commitment to creating craft within it. Not content, not thought leadership, but craft. The kind of work that people recognize as coming from someone who truly understands what they're doing.
This is sadly becoming less common. The dominant narrative is grow fast, exit, and tell the world a good founder story. The patience required to build something that lasts is treated as a liability rather than an asset.
The quiet corner
At times it's frustrating. You're quietly in a corner, making sure every bit of your limited resources is invested as well as possible. You're trying to reach people through good, deep content instead of flashy fireworks that put you in front of thousands of eyeballs for a few seconds before disappearing. You're playing a game that doesn't have the same dopamine feedback loop as watching your follower count spike after a sponsored post.
There are moments when it feels like you're going to be ruled out entirely. That you're out of sync with how the world works. That everyone else understood the rules and you're stubbornly refusing to play by them. That the companies doing the loud, capital-fueled thing are going to win simply because they showed up first and showed up louder.
But I think there's something special in the discomfort. Something worth protecting.
When you build slowly and deliberately, you build differently. You make decisions based on what's right for the long term, not what looks good this quarter. You attract people who believe in what you're doing, not people who were scared into paying. You develop a depth of understanding in your domain that can't be replicated by a well-funded competitor who just arrived.
We're building a different type of company at Tuist. One that doesn't have a flashy origin story or a breathless growth trajectory. One that won't make headlines for its funding rounds or its valuation. But one that, years from now, we'll look back on and be proud of. Proud of how we built it. Proud of who we built it for. Proud that we stayed true to something when everything around us was telling us to take the shortcut.
That's worth the frustration. That's worth the quiet.