If you’re a builder or someone with the urge to build, the factors that lead to success have changed. AI has rewritten the rules. Teams can now create products incredibly fast, which means far fewer things genuinely set you up for success as a founder.
AI has collapsed the cost of execution. Almost anything can be copied, often instantly.
Anyone can copy your product, feature set, Website, and even business model in an afternoon. What used to require large teams, significant time, and substantial capital can now be replicated with a handful of prompts and a few modern tools.
Building is no longer the hard part. Shipping something that looks and works well is table stakes, not a competitive advantage.
This breaks many of the old ideas about defensibility. Being first, being clever, or having a polished product is no longer enough to win in the market.
Tight, fast, intentional feedback loops that let you fold user feedback into your product in hours or days are what make the difference now.
Feedback loops have always mattered
Feedback loops have always been a critical success factor. Teams that learn fast and incorporate those learnings back into the product have always had a better chance at success.
What’s changed is that how little else is defensible now emphasizes building products users love more than similar ones on the market.
Before AI, when execution was slower and more expensive, things like product polish, scale, and being first to market bought you time. Copying was harder, and teams could afford slower product cycles and longer gaps between learning and implementation.
Now copying is easy. Products, features, and even entire businesses can be recreated quickly.
So feedback loops shift from being a best practice to being the thing that sets you apart. When almost everything can be copied, the speed at which you learn, adapt, and respond to reality becomes your unfair advantage.
Learning is the new unfair advantage
What actually creates an unfair advantage now is not the idea itself, but how quickly you learn once it’s out in the world.
Fast, intentional feedback loops are difficult to copy.
Feedback loops are a habit built into how a team works. This looks like building in public, learning in real time, and fixing things quickly. It means shipping continuously rather than waiting for large, infrequent releases, paying close attention to what users are actually doing, and adjusting without defending ideas that are not working.
In short, it requires letting go of what you think should exist, following the path shaped by real feedback, and doing it fast.
Feedback loops in practice
Cursor is one of many companies operating in a crowded market, a red ocean full of teams trying to solve similar problems. Yet it has emerged as one of the leading AI coding tools. They achieved this by relying on tight feedback loops. Cursor went from zero to one hundred million in revenue in its first eighteen months, then from one hundred to five hundred million the year after that. Impressive.
They didn’t get this far by having a secret, a novel idea, or an untouchable feature set. They built and improved features quickly using customer feedback. Cursor ships new features constantly, sometimes every day. Instead of guessing what users want months in advance, they release, observe what happens, and adjust immediately.
And, they dogfood their own product.
The team uses Cursor to build Cursor!
This breaks down the walls between building and learning.
Insight into what needs improving shows up instantly, not weeks or months later. Instead of relying on reports or opinions, improvements are driven by what the team is actually experiencing as they use the product themselves.
In this respect, product market fit becomes an ongoing practice rather than a one-off milestone. Feedback loops allow your team to adapt quickly as user needs change or when you see they are not being met. You can adjust much closer to real time. Even if competitors copy individual features, they can’t match the speed at which you’re learning and adapting. What’s difficult to replicate is the cadence of feedback and the discipline of responding quickly.
This has been a key driver of Cursor’s success so far. Not because it can’t be copied, but because it learns faster than the rest.
You don’t need to be the smartest, the fastest to launch, or the most original to win in the market. You win by embracing one of the oldest fundamentals of building good products: listening to users. By listening, adapting, and shipping quickly through tight feedback loops, you can bring your idea to life and shape a product that evolves alongside your users as you learn.
