The "build it and they will come" trap is real, I fell into it too. Been building a P2P marketplace solo for ~2 years and spent way too long on features nobody asked for.
What changed for me was accepting that the code is the easy part. I can ship endpoints all day with Claude Code but that doesn't mean anyone cares. The hard part is the stuff that doesn't feel like "real work" to an engineer -- talking to potential users, figuring out distribution, writing landing page copy that actually communicates the value.
I don't think most people who succeeded are liars but I do think they massively understate how much of their success was finding the right niche before writing a single line of code. The "build something you need" advice only works if you're representative of a paying market. I needed my own tool once and built it. Turns out I was the only person who needed it that way.
The vibe coding push makes it worse imo because it makes the building part feel even more trivial, which tricks you into thinking you're closer to a business than you are. You're not. You have an artifact. A business needs distribution and that's a completely different skill that most of us never learned.
No silver bullet from me either, still figuring it out myself. But at least I stopped building features and started talking to people.
https://gueden.com