Everyone's Serving AI. What's Your Signature Dish?
In the food court era of startups, depth is the new differentiator.
Launching a startup in 2025 feels like opening a restaurant in a crowded food court.
Every stall promises something hot and fresh. Every founder has a slick menu. The line between novelty and sameness has blurred.
And in this AI-flooded environment, the barrier to entry has collapsed.
Everyone’s demo works. Everyone calls themselves “AI-powered.” Everyone has some traction.
But the menu isn’t the moat.
The most common thing I’ve heard this year, from both founders and investors?
“We’ve seen a dozen of these this week.”
It’s not that these startups aren’t real. It’s that they all look the same. And when everything works, it’s harder than ever to tell what matters.
Because when the cost of building drops to near-zero, markets don’t just crowd - they flood.
Finding White Space
It used to be about finding whitespace; being the first to serve something new.
Now? It’s harder to spot. Everything looks like it’s already on the menu.
Functions and verticals have all been sliced, re-plated, and served up. And even if your dish is better, the customer’s overwhelmed by samples.
In this reality, originality won’t save you. But obsession might.
Because just like the food court, it’s not a matter of being the only one selling sushi. It’s about being the one people come back to.
You don’t need a new idea. You need a deeper one. One that sees the edge cases, understands the human friction, and picks the moment in the workflow no one else bothered to fix.
That’s the new founder superpower.
Not “first to market,” but “closest to the problem.”
Signal Collapse
What once felt like a signal (a working product, the first pilot, or an early design partner), now feels more like opening-day buzz at a mall food court: curious customers, a few paid influencers, a free sample tray.
It’s not that old cues are gone, but they’ve lost their edge. Today:
Early revenue? Often consulting wrapped in code
A polished demo? Spun up over a weekend
A pilot with a big name? Might just be a sandbox
So when everything looks good, what cuts through?
That gap between surface-level traction and real product–market fit is what I call signal collapse.
The cues investors once relied on, like polish, logos, or early ARR, now feel like commodity ingredients. Early traction is everywhere. But conviction is scarce.
Founders feel it. You ship fast. Land pilots. Hit the right milestones.
But investor interest is soft. Feedback is vague. You start to wonder:
What am I missing?
It’s not you. It’s the environment.
So what still works?
The New Playbook: Depth that Compounds
Depth is the new edge.
Not just knowing your user, but building something that compounds.
It means obsessing over the job to be done. Not in a slide, but in the messy, emotional, under appreciated reality behind the workflow.
It’s the difference between “AI for sales” and solving the Friday scramble before QBR prep. It’s the difference between “automation” and being the first tab opened every morning, and the last one closed at night.
In food court terms: you’re not just serving Thai. You’re the only stall open at 1 a.m. with spicy shrimp congee for night-shift workers.
When depth is real, it shows up in behaviour change. In loyalty. In being operationally central.
Users don’t just try the product. They reorganize their workflow around it.
You don’t just sell to one person. It spreads inside the team.
You don’t need a second act. The first one keeps digging deeper.
Depth feels different. It doesn’t just earn a second look. It earns loyalty.
And increasingly, it’s the thing that earns conviction. In a world where every demo looks good, depth becomes the proof.
It’s how investors decide a product isn’t just working - but inevitable.
And when that depth compounds - through user habits, trust, and product pull - it becomes something more enduring, even creating unexpected advantages. That’s when depth starts to look like a moat.
What Actually Compounds?
In a world where most products are built on the same APIs and foundational models, what actually compounds over time? What keeps users hooked and competitors at bay?
What matters now is depth that hardens over time:
Distribution Advantage
How you get in is as important as what you build. Deep integrations, network effects, or wedge partnerships can create winner-take-most dynamics, especially if you're embedded early.Workflow Gravity
The more someone uses your product, the harder it is to rip out. It becomes emotionally and operationally central. Not just another tool, but the way things get done.Proprietary Feedback Loops
Everyone has the same base models. What’s scarce is proprietary, messy, use-case-specific data that improves the experience over time - and gets better the more it’s used
The moat isn’t just tech. It’s trust, habits, and compounding returns.
Why Unicorns Are Getting Rarer, and Why That’s Okay
When depth becomes the key differentiator, the old winner-take-all model gives way to something else: more durable, essential companies, but fewer stratospheric unicorns.
That’s the quiet shift happening in venture. One that founders are already feeling, even if no one’s named it yet.
The unicorn math is changing.
It’s not necessarily harder to build a good company. But it’s harder to build one that breaks out in the way investors used to count on; riding a wave of whitespace to dominate a massive market.
When whitespace disappears, you don’t get one dominant player. You get a hundred stalls, each doing $5M, $20M, maybe $100M in revenue. Durable, defensible, and deeply useful. But not headline-grabbing.
It’s like what happened to the music industry after Spotify. More artists than ever. Fewer household names. Stardom didn’t vanish. It fragmented.
The same is happening with startups.
Yes, we’ll still see giants. Especially those at later stages, where teams have accumulated real distribution power, data moats, and the war chests to win. But increasingly, we’ll see craft players:
Founders who deeply understand their user
Solve something narrow but existential
And build something sticky enough to survive the next hype cycle
Some will get rolled up. Some will quietly profit. A few will break out.
But all of them will be asked the same question:
What’s your signature dish?
Final Word to Founders
If you’re building in this market, remember:
The noise isn’t your enemy. Shallow conviction is.
You’ll hear, “We’ve seen this before.”
But if your customers return, if they reorganize around your product, if you live the problem…
You’re not late. You’re right on time.
Don’t chase novelty for novelty’s sake.
Don’t confuse early traction for real depth.
Don’t serve a dish you wouldn’t eat yourself.
Build something people come back for.
Something they depend on.
That people walk past ten other stalls to get.
In a food court full of demos, depth is what gets you a line out the door. And a place people tell their friends about.
Thanks for sharing!