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Am I grossly incompetent?
Kaeya Majmundar
May 11, 2025
Over the course of two years building SwayID (2022 through 2023),
I became fully convinced I was grossly incompetent.
Not “this is hard” difficult.
Not even the acceptable “bleeding edge of legendary startup” struggles.
Grossly incompetent.
I thought I should never show my face as an entrepreneur again.
I even applied to business school.
Everything I tried…the books, the hires, the advisors, the frameworks…kept slipping through my grip.
No amount of time, money, or advice could get the business to stand up.
It was like being a basketball superfan who believes — deep down — they could play in the NBA just by trying hard.
The obsession was real.
The gap was undeniable.
I was humiliated.
Exposed.
Like the flameout everyone saw coming but was too polite to say out loud.
It got so bad I believed no business could survive under my leadership.
I even tried to hire a CEO above me before I had any indication that we were building a viable product…
I wrote the job description.
Started recruiting…
The Shift
What I didn’t understand until early 2024 was that I wasn’t failing because I was incompetent.
I was failing because I was following the wrong map.
Like trying to play pro basketball using a golf playbook.
I thought I was supposed to educate the market, align stakeholders, remove friction, and then scale.
That playbook works for 99% of companies.
But not for mine.
Because the problem I was solving wasn’t politely waiting to be noticed.
It lived in denial.
It lived in avoidance.
It lived in incentives no one wanted to disrupt.
No amount of “talent” or capital could shortcut that.
The Denial-Driven Adoption Cycle
What I was really up against wasn’t a product challenge.
It was a behavioral loop calcified in the influencer marketing industry since 2016.
Denial →
The problem is dismissed.
“Shhhhhh.”
“Someone else’s problem.”
“We’re fine.”
Avoidance →
Even as evidence builds, action is delayed.
Too inconvenient. Too threatening. Easier to look away.
Forced Consequence →
Reality intervenes.
Federal fines. Reputational hits. Class action filings.
Only when doing nothing costs more than fixing it.
đź’ˇAdoption (Through Gritted Teeth)
The solution becomes the only viable off-ramp.
❌ Not because anyone “sees the light.”
✅ Because there’s no other choice.
This wasn’t a case of dysfunction.
It was a case of opportunity in dysfunction.
The Flywheel I Didn’t Know I Was Building
The friction I was drowning in wasn’t failure.
It was the first live simulation of the adoption loop my product would later scale.
The flywheel:
Dismiss the risk.
SwayID surfaces invisible liability.
Refusal becomes reputationally untenable.
Adoption becomes the only credible off-ramp.
SwayID becomes infrastructural.
The market witnesses the legal consequences.
(Loop restarts for others.)
Not a leadership problem.
Not a talent problem.
Not a product, financial, sales, or marketing roadmap problem.
A denial loop problem.
The friction was the signal all along.
The Meta-Lesson
❌ Behavior doesn’t change when people “see the light.”
âś… It changes when they have no choice.
In categories like compliance, accountability, systemic risk, product-market fit doesn’t come from speed to market.
It comes from building structures that make refusal more expensive than action.
And trusting that inevitability compounds inside the pressure cooker of friction.
The Before / After: Traditional Execution → Behavioral Inevitability Execution
The sharpened contrast:
2022–2023: I was racing against suspicion.
2024–Present: I’m building in alignment with systemic inevitability.
Transactional Funnel | Behavioral Inevitability Funnel |
|---|---|
Educate the market | Surface invisible risk |
Align stakeholders | Document refusal (immutably) |
Remove friction | Make inaction reputationally costly |
Drive adoption through alignment | Adoption becomes the only viable off-ramp |
Optimized for speed to revenue | Optimized for systemic inevitability |
Results expected within 18-24 mos else suspicions of incompetence take over | Results emerge in due time (not imposed by arbitrary time constraints) |
Not gross incompetence. Inevitability on its own timeline.
Why This Matters
The business didn’t improve because I “leveled up.”
It improved because doing nothing finally got too expensive.
Founder “skill” mattered a lot less than I thought.
What mattered was building conditions where refusal became unaffordable.
The Brain Nude
If the thing you’re building lives in a system’s blind spot, make sure you’re not mistaking a denial-driven adoption loop for personal failure.
Denial. Avoidance. Consequence. Adoption.
Competent team + inordinate amount of friction = inevitable breakout.
Kaeya