A peculiar problem is emerging in entrepreneurship right now. We’ve spent decades trying to eliminate the barriers between having an idea and bringing it into the world. Software got cheaper. Distribution became accessible. Specialized services moved online. And now AI is compressing work that once required significant technical knowledge, substantial budgets, or entire teams into something a reasonably capable person can accomplish over a weekend. In many respects, it’s an extraordinary development. But I think this accessibility has a consequence that deserves more attention: we’re getting remarkably good at building things before we’ve figured out whether they should exist in the first place.
Consider how easy it has become to make an idea look like a legitimate business. You can generate a name, develop a visual identity, create a website, write marketing copy, and assemble a functioning product with tools that barely existed a few years ago. You can have something that looks completely polished before you’ve spoken to a prospective customer. Before you’ve examined the competition. Before you’ve determined whether the problem you’re solving is important enough that somebody will actually pay you to solve it. The traditional friction of starting a company used to force at least some deliberation. When execution was expensive, committing resources demanded a certain amount of conviction. That wasn’t always a good thing, and plenty of worthwhile ideas never got off the ground because of it. But removing that friction also removes one of the mechanisms that encouraged us to think.
And there’s another issue buried in all this newfound efficiency. A business can look increasingly sophisticated while remaining strategically incoherent. The branding can be excellent. The technology can work beautifully. The messaging can sound convincing. None of those things establishes that there’s a viable market underneath it all. In fact, the better the execution becomes, the easier it may be to overlook the weakness of the original premise. A polished presentation can create a kind of borrowed confidence, particularly when the person building it has never been forced to articulate why their offering is meaningfully different from the alternatives.
I don’t think the answer is to slow entrepreneurship to a crawl or spend six months developing a strategy document nobody will ever read. There’s a point where planning becomes an elaborate form of procrastination, and I’m certainly guilty of falling into that temptation. The more useful distinction is between thinking that reduces uncertainty and thinking that merely postpones exposure to the market. A founder who spends an afternoon identifying a specific customer problem and then tests it with real people has accomplished something valuable. A founder who spends three weeks refining a brand personality without knowing who the customer is may simply have found a more respectable way to avoid selling.
This tension is what makes my recent conversation with Eggs! The Podcast guest and Logo Geek founder, Ian Paget, particularly timely. Ian has spent years working with entrepreneurs who believe the first step toward building a business is getting a logo. His experience has led him toward a more fundamental question: What needs to be understood before the design work begins? The answer has developed into a framework he calls SEED, and although it emerged from the world of branding, I think its implications extend much further into how we build businesses in an increasingly AI-driven economy.
Before the First Design
Ian Paget is a UK-based designer, author, and founder of Logo Geek, a design business and educational community focused on logos and brand identity. What began as a side project eventually became his full-time business, supported by years of experience working with entrepreneurs and established companies. He’s also the host of the Logo Geek Podcast and author of Make a Living Designing Logos, and most recently, SEED: A Framework to Build Solid Foundations for a Business Built to Grow.
His latest project, SEED, grew from a recurring problem in his client work. People would arrive ready to invest in a visual identity without having resolved the business decisions that identity was supposed to communicate. Rather than simply offering another design service, Ian began developing a framework to help founders do that thinking first.
SEED organizes the process into four stages: Spark, Edge, Expression, and Destiny. The sequence moves from the initial idea through differentiation, how the business presents itself, and where it ultimately intends to go. Importantly, Ian describes the framework as still being developed and tested. Its value, at this stage, is in the discipline it encourages rather than any demonstrated guarantee of business success.
Three Decisions Worth Making Before You Build
The interesting thing about Ian's approach is that it doesn't require founders to become professional strategists. It asks them to make a handful of consequential decisions explicit before investing heavily in the outcome.
1. Separate what you know from what you believe
“Now I’m just gonna go out there and and check to see if this is a known fact or if this is just an assumption.”
One of the more practical elements of SEED is its distinction between information that’s known and information that’s assumed. That sounds almost embarrassingly obvious until you start examining how many business decisions are built on assumptions that have quietly become accepted facts.
A founder believes customers care most about price. The marketing is built around affordability. The pricing model follows. Months later, it turns out those customers were primarily concerned about reliability, and the company has spent considerable energy competing on something that wasn’t particularly important.
Actionable insight: Before investing in the next major initiative, write down the three assumptions most responsible for its potential success. Identify which have been confirmed through actual customer behavior or credible evidence, and which remain educated guesses. Then design the smallest reasonable test for the weakest one. The point isn’t to eliminate uncertainty. It’s to stop confusing confidence with evidence.
2. Treat strategy as a means of solving problems
“I think I think we need to to remove the word strategy and refer this to problem solving. That’s what strategy is, it’s problem solving.”
There’s something refreshing about stripping the ceremony out of strategy. The business world has built an enormous industry around frameworks, terminology, workshops, and methodologies. Some of that work is genuinely valuable. Some of it makes relatively straightforward decisions seem far more complicated than they need to be.
Ian’s point is that the framework should help you understand what you’re building well enough to begin. It shouldn’t become a permanent substitute for making decisions.
Actionable insight: Give your planning process an explicit finish line. Once you can explain the customer, the problem, your meaningful difference, and the intended destination, identify what still needs to be learned through action. Move those questions into the real world. Good strategy should make execution more intelligent, not perpetually optional.
3. Recognize what AI changes about the value of thinking
“You can just create things so fast.”
Ian acknowledges that AI is affecting the design industry and that his development of SEED is partly a response to those changes. The tools that make it easier for entrepreneurs to produce professional-looking work are also changing the economics of providing that work as a service.
That’s a meaningful shift for anyone whose business depends on execution. When more people can produce a credible-looking deliverable, the value of simply producing it becomes harder to defend. Judgment about what should be produced, who it should serve, and what would make it effective becomes a more important part of the offering.
Actionable insight: Examine where your business creates value beyond the deliverable itself. If a customer can increasingly reproduce the output with inexpensive tools, what understanding, experience, relationships, or judgment do you provide that improves the result? Those capabilities deserve deliberate investment, whether you’re a designer, consultant, developer, or founder.
The Foundation Is Never Really Finished
There’s one part of this conversation I think is especially important to get right. Preparing before you build shouldn’t imply that your early decisions are permanent. A business isn’t a building you construct once and leave unchanged. Customers evolve, markets shift, competitors appear, and the original opportunity may turn out very different from what you imagined. The point of having a foundation is to give those changes something coherent to work against.
That distinction matters because the real advantage of doing the thinking early isn’t that you’ll never make a mistake. It’s that you’ll have a better chance of recognizing one. When you understand why a business exists, who it serves, and what makes it different, you have a reference point for evaluating new opportunities. Without that clarity, every new technology, customer request, and promising market can become a reason to change direction. And in a world where AI makes those pivots increasingly easy to execute, the temptation to chase them may only grow.
The entrepreneurs who benefit most from these tools won’t necessarily be the ones who build the fastest. They’ll be the ones who can distinguish a genuinely worthwhile opportunity from something that’s merely easy to make. That requires curiosity, judgment, and a willingness to test your own assumptions against reality. None of which needs to take forever, but all of which deserves some attention before you start pouring the concrete.
Thanks for reading.
—Ryan
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The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick
One of the most useful companions to this week’s conversation. Fitzpatrick examines why entrepreneurs often get misleading feedback when they ask people about their ideas, and how to have customer conversations that reveal more useful evidence. Particularly relevant to Ian’s distinction between what you know and what you’re merely assuming.
Listen In/More to Explore
Eggs! The Podcast — Episode 485
Creating a Framework for Business Success with Ian PagetFollow Ian’s work
the SEED project
Ian on LinkedIn
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Eggs! The Podcast - https://www.eggscast.com
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