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Solve your own problems. Rahul Vohra is himself highly representative of his targeted buyers — if you’re solving your own problem in a way that you’d be paying for it and there are enough “you” in the world, you might be onto something.

Talking to users usually yields a long, complicated list of features to build. One piece of advice that YC partner Paul Buchheit (PB) always gives in this case is to look for the “90/10 solution”. That is, look for a way in which you can accomplish 90% of what you want with only 10% of the work/effort/time. If you search hard for it, there is almost always a 90/10 solution available. Most importantly, a 90% solution to a real customer problem which is available right away, is much better than a 100% solution that takes ages to build.

That’s why I like the phrase “design plagiarism”. Maybe you think Amadeo’s examples do constitute “copying”. But they’re not plagiarism. If you write an article, and then I write my own article about the same topic, that just means you were first. But if I copy your article and just change a few words, that’s plagiarism. There’s a big difference.1