Vishal Said No One Is Doing This - He Was Right

I was on a coaching call last week with a founder - let's call him V - who's building an AI chatbot product. We were deep in the weeds: reviewing a new feature, debugging an embed issue, talking through their launch timeline. Normal stuff.

At one point I pulled up a live demo. I showed him how I'd installed his chatbot on a real website - a cold outreach target - and then used it to pitch directly to the prospect. The bot already knew the prospect's business context. It could hold a relevant conversation. It wasn't generic. It felt like I'd already done research before walking in the door, except the bot did it in seconds.

V looked at it and said: "How you get this creative idea… I think there's no one's doing this shit."

He wasn't hyping me up. He was genuinely confused. And I think his confusion points to something most founders completely miss about where real product innovation actually comes from.

I Wasn't Brainstorming. I Was Selling.

Here's what actually happened. I wasn't sitting in a strategy session trying to dream up novel use cases. I wasn't doing competitive analysis or running a feature survey. I was literally using the tool to try to close a deal - and I noticed something missing.

The gap I spotted was simple: when you reach out to a prospect cold, you're starting from zero context. You know their company name, maybe their title, maybe you've read their website for five minutes. But the conversation still feels cold. The prospect can feel that you don't really know their world.

What if the chatbot could read the prospect's website, absorb their business context, and then show up already knowing who they are? Now when that prospect talks to the bot, it's not a generic demo - it's a conversation that feels like it was built for them.

That's the idea V said no one was doing. And he's probably right. But I didn't think of it in a vacuum. I thought of it because I was under real selling pressure, using the actual product, trying to make something work.

That distinction matters more than anything else I'm going to say in this post.

Why Founders Stop Generating Real Ideas

Most founders, at some point, stop selling with their own product. It happens gradually. You hire a sales team. You delegate demos. You move into "CEO mode" - strategy, hiring, fundraising. You're still working hard, but you're not in the trenches anymore. You're not the one sitting across from a skeptical prospect trying to make the software do something useful in real time.

And when you stop selling with your own product, you stop finding the real gaps.

What fills the vacuum? Feature requests. Customer surveys. Competitive analysis. Copying what went viral on LinkedIn last week. These aren't worthless - but they produce incremental ideas at best, and imitation at worst. You end up building version 1.2 of something that already exists rather than something nobody's seen before.

I wrote about this in The Cold Email Manifesto - the idea that the most dangerous place to be in sales is comfortable. The same principle applies to product. Comfort produces competence. Friction produces insight.

The Scraping Idea - Where It Actually Came From

The specific idea I showed V was this: ask the user for their prospect's website, scrape it, turn it into a context file, and feed that into the chatbot so it knows the prospect's business before the conversation starts.

It's not complicated technically. Scraping a URL and converting it to a text file that you push into a language model prompt - that's a solved problem. The technology exists. The tools exist. But nobody had apparently connected those dots in this specific context.

Why not? My guess: because most people building chatbot products aren't also using those products to run live outbound sales. They're building features their customers asked for, or copying features competitors shipped, or guessing at what would be useful based on theoretical use cases.

I was doing something different. I was trying to sell to a prospect using my own tool, and I hit a friction point - the bot didn't know anything about the person I was trying to sell to - and I thought: what if it did?

That's it. That's the whole origin story. No whiteboard. No brainstorm. No focus group. Just friction in a real workflow.

If you want to find gaps like that, you need to be in that workflow. Regularly. Under real pressure.

The "Scratch Your Own Itch" Principle - Taken Seriously

People throw around "scratch your own itch" as advice, but they usually mean: build something you personally want. That's fine as far as it goes. But what I'm talking about is more specific.

It's not just about wanting something. It's about using your tool to do real work - not a demo, not a sandbox, not a hypothetical - and running into a wall. The wall is where the idea lives.

I built ScraperCity for exactly this reason. I was doing outbound at scale and I couldn't get high-quality leads at the right price from ZoomInfo, Apollo, or Lusha. The pricing was wrong. The data quality was inconsistent. The export limits were infuriating. So I built something that solved those specific problems - not because someone asked me to, but because I was hitting those walls myself, on real campaigns, every week.

Same thing when I built Taplio. I didn't like LinkedIn. I found it annoying and time-consuming. But I needed it for lead generation and income, so instead of complaining, I built a tool to automate the parts I hated. Friction became product.

The chatbot website-scraping idea follows the same pattern. I was using the product to run a real sales outreach. I hit a friction point. I thought of a fix. The fix turned out to be something nobody had done before.

If I had handed off the sales work to someone else - if I hadn't been the one doing the demo, making the pitch, watching where the conversation fell flat - I never would have seen it.

What V's Call Actually Looked Like

Let me give you a more concrete picture of where this idea surfaced, because the context matters.

We were on a working call. V was walking me through updates to the product - backend changes, UI fixes, chatbot initialization issues, the embed placement on the website. We were debugging in real time. His dev team was fixing problems. There was a launch timeline we were trying to hit.

In the middle of all that operational noise, I pulled up a live example. I'd installed the chatbot on a prospect's site - a company called BreakCold - and I was showing V how I could use it to sell directly to the founder of ViralBox. The bot already had my business context loaded. Now the idea was: what if it also had the prospect's business context?

That's where V stopped me. That's when he said no one was doing this.

What I want you to notice is the setting. It wasn't a product roadmap meeting. It wasn't a strategy call. It was a debugging session. I was in the tool, trying to make it work for a real sales situation, and the idea emerged from the gap between what the tool could do and what I needed it to do.

Most founders would have looked at that gap and thought: "I'll submit a feature request." Or: "Maybe we'll add that in Q3." I looked at it and thought: "Wait - this is the whole point of the product. Why isn't this already here? How do we make this happen now?"

That urgency - the urgency of someone who is actively trying to use the product to close a real deal - is what separates discovery from hypothetical product planning.

The Chatbot Launch Was Days Away

Here's something else worth noting about the context. V's product was essentially ready to launch. They had eight active users, a few of them actually using the SaaS. The dev team was finishing up the chatbot - that was the main feature needed for the public launch. They were days out, maybe a week with some buffer for testing.

And in that final stretch, we found an idea that could differentiate the whole product.

Not a feature they'd been planning for months. Not something from a competitor's roadmap. Something that came up because someone was using the tool under real conditions and noticed a gap.

This is why I push founders to keep selling - even when you think you're too close to launch to mess with anything new, even when you're in execution mode, even when the last thing you want to do is think about product direction. The selling never stops being the best source of signal you have.

The Founders Who Can't Innovate

There's a specific type of founder who builds competent products and can never figure out why they're not winning.

Their product works. Their support is responsive. Their pricing is reasonable. Their roadmap is full. But the product never breaks through. It's always a solid option, never the obvious choice.

Usually the problem is that the product is built from the outside in - from customer requests, from competitor features, from market research. All of that input is filtered through other people's experience of the problem. It's secondhand. It produces incremental improvements, not leaps.

The founders who build products that feel genuinely different - the ones where people say "I've never seen anything like this" - are almost always the ones who are still in the problem themselves. Not just managing the business, but living inside the workflow, running into the same friction their customers run into, and building their way out of it.

If you've stopped selling with your own product, you've cut yourself off from your best source of genuinely novel ideas. That's not a product strategy problem. That's a proximity problem. You're too far away from the actual friction to see the actual gaps.

How to Get Back in the Workflow

If you've drifted away from using your own product under real conditions, the fix is simple - though not necessarily easy.

First: go run a real campaign with your tool. Not a demo. Not a test environment. A real outbound push to real prospects, using the product the same way your customers use it. If you sell a lead generation tool, use it to generate leads for something you're actually selling. If you sell a CRM, run your own pipeline through it. If you sell a chatbot, use it in a real sales conversation.

Pay attention to where you slow down, where you feel friction, where you catch yourself wishing the tool did something slightly different. Those moments are your product roadmap. Those moments are where the ideas live that no competitor survey will ever surface, because your competitors aren't having those conversations either.

Second: don't hand off the insight. When you find a friction point, don't just log it in a feature tracker and move on. Sit with it. Figure out whether it's a real gap or just a workflow issue on your end. If it's a real gap, ask: does any competitor solve this? If not - why not? Is it technically hard? Is it just something nobody's tried? Is it something that only shows up when you're using the product in a very specific real-world context?

That last question is usually the most interesting. A lot of the best product ideas are hiding in use cases that only emerge when you're doing real work under real pressure. They're invisible to people who only see the product from a demo or a support ticket.

Third: build fast enough to test the idea before the moment passes. One of the things I noticed on V's call is that the scraping idea was technically achievable with tools they already had. The scraping infrastructure existed. The AI integration existed. The chatbot existed. The connection between them was the idea - and that connection was maybe a few days of dev work, not a new product line.

When you find an idea like that, you need to move on it. The clarity of the insight fades fast. The urgency of the moment fades fast. If you don't capture it and build it while it's live in your head, it becomes a note in a doc somewhere that nobody acts on.

The Real Test of a Product Idea

Here's how I know the website-scraping-to-chatbot idea was real and not just clever: when I showed it to V, his first reaction wasn't "interesting" or "maybe." It was "how did you think of this" followed immediately by "nobody's doing this."

That's the signal. When a smart person who knows the space sees something and their gut reaction is that it doesn't exist yet - that's different from enthusiasm about a feature. Enthusiasm is cheap. Genuine surprise from someone with context is rare.

Most ideas people call "creative" or "innovative" are actually just slightly better versions of things that already exist. They're defensible, but they're not surprising. They don't make people stop and wonder how you got there.

The ideas that make people stop - those almost always come from direct, friction-laden experience inside a real workflow. Not from whiteboard sessions. Not from competitor analysis. Not from asking customers what they want.

From doing the actual work. From using your own product to solve a real problem. From hitting a wall and asking: why does this wall exist?

V said no one's doing this. He was right. And the reason no one's doing it isn't because it's technically hard. It's because most founders aren't in the position where they'd ever discover it - because they've stopped selling with their own product.

Get back in the workflow. The ideas are there. You just have to be close enough to the friction to see them.

If you're building your outbound system and want to start sourcing contacts for real campaigns - the kind where you're actually using the tools yourself - ScraperCity's B2B database is where I start. You can also pull targeted lists with the Google Maps scraper or enrich your existing contacts with the email finder. Build a real list, run a real campaign, use your own product to do it - and see what you discover in the friction.

And if you want to go deeper on the outbound side, grab the Top 5 Cold Email Scripts - they're free, and they're the same ones we use internally before we iterate on anything new.