How six months of building nothing changed how I build everything.

Everybody talks about product-market fit. Investors ask about it. Accelerators obsess over it. Founders chase it like it's the final boss of entrepreneurship. I think we're skipping a step. Before your product fits the market, you have to fit the problem. You have to earn the right to solve it. That's where domain expertise comes in, and I honestly think it's one of the most underrated predictors of whether a startup ever has a chance. Research from scholars like Noam Wasserman and work discussed by Harvard Business Review have repeatedly shown that founders with prior industry experience are better at recognising opportunities, making strategic decisions, and navigating uncertainty. Looking back, I don't find that surprising anymore. I lived the opposite.

Last year, I became obsessed with healthcare. It felt like one of those industries where every conversation revealed another broken process. Long waiting times. Disconnected records. Poor communication. It looked like a goldmine for innovation. Like every optimistic entrepreneur, I looked at it and thought, "Surely there's something we can build here." That excitement eventually became Caresync. Even more Surprising and Ultimately Misleading was the fact that i could sell the product, We got 350 users on our waitlist in one night as a result of me sharing a story, Looking back now, I smile a little because Caresync never became a product. But at the time, it felt like the beginning of something big.

For months, our days looked exactly how Linkedin Influencers say they're supposed to look. Customer interviews. Product discussions. Whiteboards covered with ideas. Figma screens multiplying every week. We had recurring Monday meetings, Wednesday meetings, strategy sessions, follow-up calls, you name it. Funny enough, I was clearing my calendar recently and deleting some of those recurring meetings. Seeing them made me laugh. Not because meetings are bad, but because they reminded me how easy it is to mistake a full calendar for real progress. We looked incredibly busy. We just weren't moving.

The deeper we went, the stranger things became. We'd leave one stakeholder meeting convinced we'd finally understood the workflow, only for the next conversation to completely dismantle our assumptions. We'd redesign ideas before they even had a chance to become products. Every answer created three new questions. At some point it hit me: we weren't building a healthtech product. We were studying healthcare while pretending we were building a product. Those are two completely different jobs, and we were unknowingly trying to do both at the same time.

That experience completely changed how I think about domain expertise. It's not about having a fancy title or spending twenty years in an industry. It's about context. It's about understanding the invisible parts outsiders don't see. Why does this process exist? Why hasn't anyone changed it? Who actually makes decisions? Who benefits from the current system? Which frustrations are worth solving, and which ones are simply consequences of regulation or economics? Those are questions you rarely ask when you're excited by an opportunity. Ironically, they're the questions that matter most.

Entrepreneurs can be dangerously optimistic people. Give us one inconvenience and suddenly we're checking if the domain name is available. My banking app delays one transfer and, for about fifteen minutes, I'm convinced I can reinvent fintech. My internet slows down and I briefly become a telecommunications expert. Nigeria alone can hand you twenty startup ideas before breakfast. The problem is that experiencing pain is not the same as understanding it. Being frustrated by healthcare didn't make me qualified to build for healthcare. It simply made me aware that something was wrong.

The biggest cost wasn't the months we spent researching. The biggest cost was that we couldn't even judge whether the problem deserved tech in the first place. That's what a lack of domain expertise steals from you. It doesn't just affect execution; it affects judgement. We didn't know enough to separate a software problem from a policy problem. We couldn't tell whether people needed a better product or an entirely different process. Without context, everything looks like an app waiting to happen.

When we Started Encirco, the contrast was obvious. This wasn't an industry I was trying to understand while building. I'd spent over seven years working closely with entrepreneurs and businesses. My co-founder had done the same. We'd helped people setup companies, prepare legal documents, navigate regulatory processes, stay compliant and deal with the operational realities of running businesses. We'd listened to entrepreneurs complain about the same bottlenecks for years. By the time we started building Encirco, we weren't searching for problems anymore. We'd been living beside them for years.

One thing surprised me the most. Building felt faster or was Actually faster, but not because we'd become smarter developers or better entrepreneurs. It felt faster because there was less guessing. Product conversations became shorter because everyone understood the customer. Features weren't coming from brainstorming sessions; they came from years of watching patterns repeat themselves. That's what domain expertise quietly buys you. It doesn't magically produce better ideas. It removes thousands of bad ones before they ever make it onto your roadmap. In many ways, knowing what not to build is more valuable than knowing what to build.

So these days, I no longer tell entrepreneurs to build what they're curious about. Curiosity is a fantastic reason to learn. It's a terrible reason to start a company. Build what you've earned the right to understand. That doesn't mean you can't enter a new industry. It means you should respect it enough to become an insider before trying to change it. The best products aren't usually built by people who spotted a problem first. They're built by people who stayed with the problem long enough to understand why it still exists.

Looking back, I don't think Caresync was a failure. I think it was what we’d consider “expensive school fees” but worthwhile. It taught me that startups are built on insight, not excitement. That meetings aren't momentum. That curiosity isn't context. And that domain expertise isn't just another startup buzzword, it's the difference between building around assumptions and building around understanding. If Encirco ever succeeds, a part of that success will belong to Caresync. Not because of what we built, but because of what it taught us before we built the right thing.

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