Here is a number that should change how you think about building: roughly 5%. That is the hit rate. Not just for first-time founders -- for experienced builders who have tested dozens of hypotheses across years of focused work.

Out of many ideas explored, maybe 1 in 20 makes real money and grows. Everything else -- the clever concepts, the elegant prototypes, the things that felt inevitable at the time -- goes nowhere. Not because the execution was poor. Because the market did not care.

The instinct is to treat this as a problem to solve. If the hit rate is 5%, surely the answer is better research, sharper strategy, more rigorous validation before you build. And yes, those things help. But they do not change the fundamental maths. They push 5% to maybe 8% or 10%.

The real leverage is on the other side of the equation: iterate faster.

The maths of disciplined iteration

If your hit rate is 5% and you only ever test one idea, you are overwhelmingly likely to miss. The founders who find product-market fit are not the ones who pick better on the first attempt -- they are the ones who test, learn, and redirect faster than everyone else. Speed of iteration is the real edge.

This is not an argument for carelessness. It is an argument against the perfectionism that kills most ventures before they ever reach a customer. The founder who spends six months polishing a product nobody asked for has optimised the wrong variable. The founder who tests a hypothesis quickly, listens to what happens, and doubles down on what works is playing the right game.

Your constraints are your superpowers. Ship the kick-ass half, not the half-assed whole.

Why studios are built for this

A solo founder building their one company has a single shot at the 5%. Their entire career, savings, and identity are wrapped up in that one bet. The psychological pressure to keep going -- to ignore the signals, to add one more feature, to pivot one more time -- is immense. Walking away feels like failure.

A venture studio brings structured discipline to this process. The studio's job is to validate ruthlessly in the early stages -- and then go all in on what survives. Killing a hypothesis that is not working is not failure. It is the system functioning correctly. Every dead end sharpens judgment and raises the baseline for the next iteration.

This is not about spreading bets. It is about concentrating effort where the signal is strongest. Test fast, learn fast, commit fully when you find it.

AI changes the maths again

The 5% hit rate was established in a world where building was expensive. Every hypothesis consumed months of focused effort. The cost of testing was high, so people committed to ideas prematurely and agonised over each one.

AI compresses the cost of validation dramatically. An idea that would have taken a team three months to prototype can now be tested in days. This does not change the hit rate -- the market is still the market -- but it radically changes how fast you can find the signal worth committing to.

The result is not building more things. It is reaching conviction faster. You spend days validating instead of months, which means you commit your full energy to the right problem sooner.

But -- and this is the critical nuance -- speed without focus is just noise. The point is not to test random things faster. The point is to bring commercial discipline to each hypothesis, keep the scope tight, validate against real customers fast, and commit fully when the signal is there.

What focused iteration looks like

Every venture we explore starts with the same questions: Is this a real problem that people will pay to solve? Can we reach those people? Does AI give us a structural advantage in solving it? If any answer is unclear, we spend a few days testing -- not a few months building.

The ideas that survive real-world contact get our full commitment. The ones that don't get killed cleanly, and every lesson feeds forward. The goal is not to run many things at once. It is to find the right thing fast and pour everything into it.

The uncomfortable part

Accepting a 5% hit rate means accepting that most of your work will not succeed. That is hard. It runs against the narrative of the visionary founder who sees the future and builds towards it with unwavering conviction.

But unwavering conviction applied to the wrong problem is just stubbornness. The builders who consistently create value are the ones who hold strong opinions loosely, test them against reality constantly, and have the discipline to walk away from ideas they love when the evidence says they should.

This is not cynicism. It is respect for the market. The market does not care about your conviction. It cares about whether you are solving a problem that matters. The fastest way to find that problem is to test, listen, and commit -- with more honesty than feels comfortable.

Perfection is the enemy. Speed, combined with judgment and the discipline to go all in when it matters, is the strategy.