People ask me this question a lot. Usually after I show them whatever I'm working on at the moment, which tends to be something different from whatever I was working on the month before. They want to know: how do you decide? What's the framework? Where's the spreadsheet?
There's no spreadsheet. I wish there was. It would make my life significantly simpler and my accountant significantly happier.
What there is.. is a feeling. And I know how that sounds. I've sat in enough boardrooms and pitch meetings to know that "I had a feeling" doesn't exactly inspire investor confidence. But I've learned something over the years: the feeling is the data. It's just data you haven't been taught to read yet.
Pattern Recognition
The first thing that happens, always, is I notice something shifting. Not a trend. I don't trust trends. Trends are what LinkedIn tells you to care about. What I mean is something more fundamental.. a behaviour changing, a frustration growing, a gap between what exists and what should exist.
When I was building Ceros, the pattern I noticed was that marketers had ideas they couldn't execute. They had to go through developers, through designers, through project managers. By the time the idea became a thing, it had been committee'd into something unrecognisable. The gap between creative vision and creative output was enormous. That gap was the signal.
More recently, I noticed the same kind of gap in a different place. Creative teams moving at the speed of molasses because every single output required human hands at every single step. Briefing, concepting, designing, revising, building. All manual. All slow. All expensive. And meanwhile, the AI tools were getting genuinely good.. but nobody was connecting them to real creative workflows in a way that respected the craft.
That frustration became Jony. An AI creative director that actually understands what good looks like, because it was built by someone who genuinely cares about what good looks like.
The Frustration Test
Pattern recognition gets you to the neighbourhood. But the thing that actually makes me commit.. the thing that tips me from "that's interesting" to "I'm building this".. is personal frustration.
I have to be annoyed by the problem. Genuinely, personally annoyed. Not theoretically. Not "the market has a pain point." I need to feel the pain point in my own work, in my own day, in my own creative process.
If I'm the customer, I build different things. I build things I'd actually use. I make choices based on what feels right versus what a focus group said. I have opinions about the details, because the details bother me personally.
Every single thing I've built that worked started this way. Every single thing I've built because I thought the market wanted it.. didn't.
The Energy Test
This one's harder to explain because it's genuinely irrational. But it's the most reliable signal I have.
When an idea has real potential for me, it does something specific. It wakes me up at 4am. Not with anxiety. With excitement. I'm lying there thinking about how the pieces fit together, what it could become, who would use it, what the first version looks like. My brain won't stop turning it over.
I've learned to pay attention to that. Because the opposite is also true. Some ideas are perfectly logical. They make sense on paper. The market research checks out. And I feel nothing. Zero pull. Those ideas, without exception, die on a shelf somewhere.
The 4am test isn't about being a workaholic. It's about conviction. If I'm going to spend the next year of my life building something, it better be something that lights me up. Because building anything worthwhile is hard, and the only fuel that lasts is genuine obsession.
What I Ignore
Honestly? Most things. I ignore market research. I ignore competitor analysis. I ignore what VCs say is hot this quarter. I ignore what other people think I should build based on my LinkedIn profile.
This sounds arrogant and I don't mean it to be. I'm not saying those things are worthless. For some people and some businesses, they're essential. But for the way I work, they're noise. They pull me away from the signal.
The signal is always the same three things in combination: a pattern I've noticed, a frustration I've felt, and an energy I can't ignore. When all three line up, I build. When they don't, I wait.
Waiting is underrated, by the way. Some of my best ideas sat in the back of my mind for years before the timing was right. Jony is a perfect example. The frustration with creative workflows has been building in me for a decade. But the technology wasn't there. The AI wasn't good enough. I needed to wait until the tools caught up with the vision. And then, one day, they did. And I couldn't not build it.
The First Version Is Always Ugly
Something I wish more people understood about building things: the first version of everything good was terrible. Not okay. Not rough. Terrible. Embarrassing. The kind of thing you'd never show anyone if you had any sense.
But the first version's job isn't to be good. Its job is to exist. To be real enough that you can react to it, learn from it, and build the second version. And the third. And the thirtieth.
I've lost count of how many first versions I've built that looked nothing like the final product. That's the point. You don't know what you're building until you start building it. The plan is the starting gun, not the map.
This is where I think a lot of smart people get stuck. They want to know exactly where they're going before they take the first step. They want the business model, the revenue projections, the competitive moat, the three-year roadmap. And while they're planning, someone with less preparation and more conviction ships something and starts learning.
Right Now
Right now, I'm building more things simultaneously than at any point in my career. And I'm doing it faster than I ever thought possible. That's partly AI. The compression of time between idea and prototype is extraordinary. Something that used to take weeks takes days. Something that took days takes hours.
But it's also experience. Years of pattern recognition have built up a kind of creative intuition that I've learned to trust. I know what a good idea feels like. I know what the warning signs look like when an idea is all logic and no soul. I know when to push through the ugly phase and when to walk away.
There's no framework for that. You can't put it in a slide deck. But it's the most valuable thing I own.
If you're trying to figure out what to build next, here's my actual advice: stop researching and start noticing. Pay attention to what frustrates you. Pay attention to what excites you. Pay attention to the gap between how things are and how they should be. And when you feel that pull.. the one that won't let you sleep.. trust it.
The worst thing that happens is you build something that doesn't work. The best thing that happens is you build something that changes everything.
Either way, you'll learn more from building it than you ever would from planning it.
Simon Berg builds at the intersection of creativity and technology. He writes about what he's seeing, what he's building, and why creativity matters more than ever.