I read hundreds of comments about how people actually make money with AI. One lesson kept repeating.

Find a real buyer first, before writing a line of code. Solve a painful problem, not an interesting idea; nobody pays for interesting. Validate before building; most people build first and ask later, which is exactly backwards. Distribution matters more than the product itself; coding is the easy part now, getting in front of the right people is what actually takes months. AI is a tool, not a business; it helps you build faster, but it doesn't hand you customers.

The single skill underneath all of it is customer discovery. Not coding, not prompting, not building. Finding someone with a real problem and confirming they'll actually pay to fix it.

I've launched 50+ tools and the ones that got any traction all had one thing in common. I knew who needed them before I built them, not after.

Anyone else learn this the hard way, building first and validating after?