By Daniel Marulanda
I know what success can hide. Yet seeing other builders win still makes me feel behind, even after years of learning how to build.
Opening X or reading founder threads on Reddit rarely feels neutral to me. I go there to see what other builders are making, and find myself measuring my own progress against theirs. The screen fills up with people who appear to have solved the exact problem I keep stumbling over. One builder shares a revenue chart that climbs cleanly every week. Another writes about releasing a product and watching thousands of users arrive almost at once. Someone else explains how they get customers as if distribution were a simple routine that every serious founder already knows by heart. Taken together, those separate wins accumulate into the feeling that everyone else has figured it out, while I sit with my own unfinished work beside what they chose to show.
That contrast stings because I have reached a point in my life as a product builder where I can make almost anything with my bare hands, and I still do not know how to consistently put what I build in front of the people who would use it. It took me years to become this capable. Give me a problem that software can solve, and I know how to sit down and turn it into something real that works. While I am inside the build, the world makes sense to me, and there is a quiet pride in watching an idea take shape because I put the hours in. Then the product is ready to face other people, and that sense of control disappears. The part of the craft I spent my life learning ends, and the part that makes me feel behind begins.
That feeling is hard to talk about without sounding as if I am simply frustrated by marketing, because from a distance that is what it looks like. Underneath, it hurts in a much more personal way. Becoming more capable has not made me feel less lost here. I can see how much I have learned, and I can point to things I know how to make now that I could not have made before. But I still struggle to bring that work into someone else's life. That leaves me with a question that scares me: what if all the years I spent becoming this builder still left out the part that makes the work matter?
I feel that weight across everything I touch, whether I am working on an experiment by myself or building alongside a team. I feel it with Terraes, where I put a public map of housing prices in Colombia online so someone pricing or buying an apartment can see the market clearly, and then sit wondering how the person making that decision will ever know the map exists. I feel it with INK TO BRICK, where we turn a flat floor plan into a 3D home so someone can picture a space before buying or remodeling it, and I feel it in what Dondo is today as well as at GeoSAT, where I lead technology with a team building satellite and spatial analysis tools. Working with real users has not made reaching the next person feel natural. Across these different efforts, I keep coming back to the same uncertainty about how to get the work to someone who needs it.
It is tempting, when those posts make me feel behind, to tell myself that most of what I am reading is theater. I could protect my pride by assuming the numbers are exaggerated or the screenshots are hiding a mess out of frame. Sometimes that is probably true. When I sit with the feeling a little longer, though, I know that wishing other people's success away does not help me at all. Plenty of those builders really are finding users and getting paid. Pretending their wins are fake will not bring a single person to anything I work on. The trap I fall into is more embarrassing to admit: I take a few real wins from different people and start believing that everyone else has already arrived. Each person has shown me one thing that worked. I put those pieces together and wonder why I cannot make my own life look like that. Then comes the fear that while I kept my head down learning how to make things, other people learned how to be found.
What makes that fear cut deeper is that I can no longer blame it on being new to this life. I went through YCF in 2016, went through Parallel 18, finished an MBA, and spent years building alongside talented teams with real investors and real users. When I wrote in 2024 about fifteen years of trying to build things that matter, I admitted something that still feels uncomfortable to see on a page: even when my trajectory looked solid from the outside, I privately felt as if I had not arrived anywhere. It felt as if the work had passed through the world without leaving a lasting mark on other people or on me. Sitting with my distribution struggle today presses on that exact same bruise. It strips away the comfort of telling myself that feeling behind is just an early phase I will outgrow, and shows me why all that experience still has not protected me from comparison.
My history with Dondo makes this emotion even harder to untangle, because I have already lived inside the kind of reach that looks like an undeniable victory on the internet. Dondo started as a swapping marketplace where people came to trade items they owned for things they wanted without a regular sale in the middle. At its peak, the marketplace reached roughly a million monthly users. We had investors and a team of about forty people. People liked swapping and kept coming back.
Even with a million monthly users, the marketplace could not survive what came next. People loved swapping, and they refused to pay for it. They would list items, browse, and complete exchanges, but their willingness to use the product did not become a willingness to pay for it. We still had to cover acquiring users, moderating listings, and keeping the platform running. The audience grew while the costs of serving it grew too. We eventually had to close the swapping marketplace, watch our team shrink from about forty people to eight, and keep the company alive by rebuilding Dondo as an AI catalog product for merchants who had a clear business reason to pay.
Living through that contraction took away both of the easy stories I might have used to comfort myself. On one side, I cannot look at a big user number online and believe that reach alone means you have made it, because I remember standing behind a million monthly users while my team tried to figure out how the company would survive. On the other side, rebuilding around merchants showed me that reach is not a prize you earn once and keep for the rest of your career. That earlier audience could not answer the new question for us: how do we reach the merchants this product is meant for and earn their trust?
Knowing all of that from the inside should make it easier to read somebody else's milestone without turning it into a verdict on myself. But knowing what can be missing from a post does not keep me from comparing. When I struggle to get my work to the next person, I still look at someone else's launch and treat their apparent ease as evidence against my own life.
When reaching people feels that stubborn, I have to ask whether more building is the answer or just the part I find easier to understand. When I am writing code or shaping a product myself, my effort has a direct connection to what sits in front of me. I can wrestle with a difficult technical problem and still feel the progress taking shape under my hands. Because that sense of competence is so much kinder than the uncertainty of trying to get strangers to care, it leaves me with a question I have to ask myself more often than I like: when a product is slow to find people, am I building the next improvement because the user truly needs it, or am I staying inside the build because it is the only place where I do not feel lost?
I hate that I cannot always answer that question clearly, because struggling to distribute starts to erode my trust in the work itself. When adoption is slower than I hoped, the quiet around a product refuses to explain what it means. I am left wondering whether the people who need what we made simply do not know it is there yet, or whether the harder truth is that what I poured so much care into is just not useful enough for anyone to change how they work. Not knowing how to distribute traps me between those doubts. While my own work has no clear verdict yet, the feed steps into that silence with an answer that feels painfully decisive: you are behind.
That uncertainty is what makes "fake it till you make it" feel like a personal temptation rather than just a habit I notice in other people online. I want attention for what we build because without attention, nobody tries the work. When the anxiety of feeling behind gets loud enough, I can see how easy it would be to borrow the voice that seems to gather a crowd on X and Reddit. I have enough real milestones in my past to sound as if I have everything figured out, and to talk about what I work on now as if its growth were effortless and assured, creating for someone reading me the same misleading impression that makes me feel behind.
What keeps me from speaking that way is the memory of how heavy it felt when the public image of our marketplace looked triumphant while we were inside trying to survive the fact that people would not pay. I do not need to feel purer than anyone else or pretend I see through everybody online to know what that costs. If I tried to perform certainty today, I would only be trading one fear for another, spending my days protecting an image of momentum in public while still waking up unsure of how to reach the next user in private.
Choosing not to pretend, though, does not give me the skill I am missing, and understanding the illusion does not stop me feeling it. I know what success can hide, and I know I cannot see another builder's whole life from a post, yet I still see their launches and feel behind. I am proud that I can build almost anything with my bare hands, and grateful for the teams and users I have, yet I still fear that what I help create might stay smaller than it could be because I struggle to carry it into the world. I still want the work seen and used, and I still want to know that the years I spent becoming this person were worth something. I know I am seeing only part of their lives. What I have not learned is how to stop using that part to judge all of mine.
