Your good taste is keeping your startup broke

"Taste is all you need." That's the line right now on X. Every vibecoder, every solo founder shipping their AI side project says, "taste is the new moat, it is the differentiator."

Now explain to me why Labubu, Guess bags, and Marvel are worth billions, and your tasteful side project has twelve users.

Hi, Daria Strategy here. I help tech teams with positioning and narrative, so they can easily communicate their product’s value.

As someone who has visited a vast number of art museums in Europe, collects niche perfumes, and can recommend Michelin restaurants in half the continent, I'd be happy to agree with those who claim taste as the most valuable skill in the AI era. But there's a big misconception about taste in business that I can't ignore.

I studied management and sociology, cultural anthropology is my guilty pleasure. I've been to more art museums across Europe than I can count. I collect niche perfumes. I can recommend you the best Michelin restaurant. I would love to agree that taste is the answer.

But there's a massive misconception about taste in business that I can't let slide.

Kim Kardashian didn't build a billion-dollar brand by having high-end taste. You can argue all day about whether her aesthetic is tasteful or tasteless — that's beside the point.

What Kim understood is what people want to be seen consuming. That's a fundamentally different skill from having good taste. And it cannot be vibecoded.

The things that win in the market aren't winning on taste. They're winning on attention, desire, status signaling, and distribution. Four words that never appear in a single "taste is all you need" tweet.

People are conflating personal aesthetic preferences with commercial instinct. Those are two completely different muscles. The market doesn't care which one you think you have.

Movies are one of the clearest examples of the gap between taste and commercial success.

Paolo Sorrentino is one of my favorite directors. His characters are deep, their struggles feel real, and their appearance is authentic. You watch The Great Beauty or Parthenope, and you walk out with more questions. Often uncomfortable ones. That's what makes his work brilliant. And exactly why his audience is niche.

Now take Marvel. You know who's good and who's bad within five minutes. The movies entertain through flawlessly executed clichés. They're understandable in almost every country on earth. That's why Marvel dominated cinema for a decade. Even with Captain America, who might be the dumbest character in the entire Marvel universe.

The vibecoder posting "taste wins" is essentially saying they're going to be Sorrentino. But the market rewards Kevin Feige — the person who understands what a global audience wants to feel on a Friday night.

Is there a middle ground? Wes Anderson. Genuine taste combined with a deep understanding of his brand as a marketable aesthetic. But that's exceptionally rare. And even Anderson is tiny compared to Marvel.

If you're telling yourself taste is your edge, ask honestly: are you Wes Anderson? Pretending you are while ignoring distribution is a very expensive form of self-deception.

Two things are happening in the market that both look like "tastelessness" from a distance. They operate on completely different principles.

All dictators love golden interiors. They are not referencing anything. No commentary on design history. This is expensive, therefore good. Tastelessness bypasses the conversation about beauty and goes straight to desire.

Guess bags work the same way. The allusion to Gucci is so obvious it's almost endearing — premiumness at an affordable price. About three billion dollars in annual revenue. Three billion for logo-heavy bags no fashion critic would take seriously. Meanwhile, independent designers with beautiful craftsmanship struggle to break a few million. Guess won on brand recognition, advertising, and distribution.

Now — kitsch. Kitsch knows exactly what it's doing. It borrows the feeling of meaning or beauty without earning it.

Balenciaga. Once famous for sophisticated haute couture. Then Demna Gvasalia mastered the art of kitsch, making people pay hundreds for what looks like an IKEA bag. He understood that in a saturated luxury market, provocation sells faster than craft. The product isn't the bag. The product is the reaction.

And Labubu. Deliberately ugly, which is actually a sophisticated aesthetic move, closer to kitsch than tastelessness. POP MART found a direct path to millennial wallets by making "ugly" the new aspirational.

Kitsch is closer to taste than tastelessness is. It requires awareness of what "good" looks like to simulate it. Tastelessness skips that step entirely.

But the market rewards both. Tastelessness sells through blunt desire. Kitsch sells through the comfortable simulation of meaning. Both consistently beat actual taste in commercial performance.

The "taste" framing is a cope. It lets technical people rebrand themselves as aesthetes so they don't have to confront the harder truth: the bottleneck was never code, and it was never taste. It's distribution and product-market fit.

Code used to be the moat. AI erased that. Now people are scrambling for the next exclusive skill to claim, and "taste" sounds elegant. It sounds like a permanent advantage.

But what vibecoders actually need is knowing what triggers people to click, share, buy, or come back. Understanding positioning: who is this for, why now, why this instead of the thousand other things AI can generate. Having the nerve to ship something loud and imperfect rather than polishing endlessly in private.

That's commercial instinct. That's marketing. Those are trainable skills. They're just less flattering to talk about than taste.

Sometimes taste and commercial instinct overlap. Steve Jobs had both. But most people who say they have "taste" are describing a preference. A preference is what you like. Commercial instinct is understanding what other people will pay for. Those can be the same thing. Usually they aren't.

The good news: commercial instinct is trainable. It comes from empathy: watching and listening to other people. This requires leaving your comfort zone and observing how non-technical humans make purchasing decisions.

Broaden your inputs. Go to museums, but also go to an underground club in Berlin. Try food you've never heard of. Smell weird fragrances. Meet people outside your circle. Watch how they react to things. What they reach for. What they ignore.

Talk to people. Ask what they like and why. Stop thinking of users as "men 18 to 45 in Western Europe" and start thinking of them as people with insecurities, desires, and a credit card.

In a world flooded with AI-generated everything, the person who understands why people buy things will always beat the person who just thinks they have good taste.

I love taste. I spend my life pursuing it. But I've spent enough years in go-to-market strategy to know that taste alone has never been a business model.

The market rewards people who understand desire, attention, and distribution. You can have all three and great taste on top. But if you have to pick, pick the one that pays.

If you're building something and the message isn't landing, reach out to me at hey@dariastrategy.com