Why 10x better is easier to build than 10% better

I’ve been building for 25 years. Dot-com. Mobile. Cloud. I’ve seen every wave.

Right now is different. I genuinely think this is the best time in history to be a founder. Not because of the headlines. Because of what’s actually possible with AI - what you can build, how fast you can build it, and what problems you can now go after that were out of reach five years ago.

Europe is right in the middle of it. 35,000 startups. More than any other region in the world.

There’s a lot of noise too. Slop. Hype. Fear. Most of it misses the point.

This is for early-stage founders who are building. And for anyone who's thinking about it.

Building something 10 times better than what exists is often easier than building something 10% better. I talked about this on The Entrepreneur Experiment recently and the response surprised me.

This isn’t an original idea. I associate it most with Google X, where Larry Page talked about it constantly. Peter Thiel makes the same argument in Zero to One. But in ten years of talking to founders, I’m still surprised how few have actually internalised it.

I know. It sounds wrong. Here’s why it isn’t.

Why 10% better is a trap

When you set out to build something 10% better, you start with what already exists. You find the rough edges and smooth them. You’re working inside the same assumptions, the same infrastructure, the same mental model of the problem. You just can’t help it.

That sounds sensible. It isn’t.

You inherit every constraint of the thing you’re improving. And a 10% better product is almost never enough to make someone switch. Humans have inertia. There’s always a cost to changing.

10% is a hard sell. Tell someone you’re going to make finance 10% better. See what happens. Tell them you’re going to make it 10 times better - for example, that founders will have real-time visibility and control over their entire financial picture for the first time - and the conversation changes.

10x means starting over

When you aim for 10x, the existing solution isn’t your starting point. There’s no tweak that gets you there. So you go back to the problem itself - what is the customer actually trying to do, what do they genuinely value, what’s in the way - and build from scratch.

This is first principles thinking. It’s not just for engineers. It applies to every function, every team. Product, marketing, operations, finance - any strategy can be approached the same way. What are we actually trying to achieve? What assumptions are we carrying that don’t need to be there?

When you strip out those assumptions, the problem often looks completely different. Sometimes simpler. Sometimes the real blocker isn’t what anyone thought.

At Google X, we always asked: what does the customer actually value? Not what they say they value. Not what the existing product delivers. What would genuinely change things for them if you got it right?

Gmail is a great example. Email wasn’t new. But the constraint everyone accepted - that storage was limited, that you had to constantly delete things - wasn’t a law of nature. It was a cost problem. Google had the server capacity to offer a gigabyte of storage when everyone else was offering megabytes. One insight. The rest followed.

Gmail started out as a creative project - a 20% project - built by an engineer who asked: what would email look like if storage wasn’t a constraint? Google gave people the room to ask those types of questions. The result became one of the most used products in the world.

Your team is sitting on the same kind of thinking. Every function has assumptions baked in. The best thing we can do as founders is create the conditions for those to be challenged. Not just at the top. Everywhere.

People follow ambition

There’s another reason 10x is easier. In my experience, big ambition attracts a different kind of person. The best engineers, the best operators - they’re not looking for a place to make something slightly more efficient. They want to work on a problem worth solving. The scale of the outcome has to justify the risk of leaving something stable.

Capital works the same way. VCs aren’t backing you to be incrementally better. They need a shot at an outsized return. A 10% better product in a crowded market doesn’t give them that. A 10x product that creates a new category might.

What 10x actually looks like

The iPhone wasn’t a better Nokia. Google wasn’t a better AltaVista. Uber wasn’t a better taxi dispatch. Every one of them asked: what could this experience be if we ignored the constraints of what already exists? Then built from there.

Pick any dimension customers genuinely care about - speed, cost, simplicity, reliability - and ask what 10x better looks like in that dimension. Then ask what assumptions you’d have to throw out to get there. That’s where the interesting work starts.

For Seapoint, the question was straightforward. Founders were running their finances across four or five disconnected tools - different banks, FX providers, spreadsheets, expense platforms, accounting software - none talking to each other. No single view. A manual reconciliation exercise every month that nobody had time for.

That’s not 10% better than a bank. A bank doesn’t try to solve that problem. It’s a different category entirely.

The one question

Before you start building, ask yourself honestly: is this 10% better or 10x better?

If it's 10%, know why. Sometimes that's the right call. But if you're sitting on an idea right now - in this moment, with these tools, in this market - the 10x question is worth sitting with before you write a line of code.

What would you have to throw out to get there? That's where it starts.

There has never been a better time to ask it.

Seapoint is building the financial home for Europe's most ambitious startups. If that's you, or you're working up to it, sign up here.