I once worked for a department in a large at the time F10 company. My manager was the founder of the startup that was acquired.<p>As the founder, he had been scrappy, found a need in market that was a large highly regulated two sided B2B market. His team wrote a web app/mobile app (ruggedized Windows CE devices). By the time his company was acquired, they had 90% of addressable market, but didn’t have two or three of the largest players.<p>After being acquired, the acquiring company made him relocate and most of his former employees didn’t want to relocate. He was under 30 and hired a bunch of “smart people” in their 20s to expand to the other side of the B2B market.<p>This time, with plenty of money and not having to worry about financing, he lost the plot. The “smart people” spent more time being concerned with proper unit testing and code coverage, “good architecture”, “good processes”, etc. two years later, we had a wonderful product no one wanted. But, the three of the five biggest players were interested in the “legacy” product.<p>None of us wanted to be building on a PHP product and raises weren’t forthcoming because our team wasn’t making money. We all saw the writing on the wall and all 15 of us left within the next six months - starting with me. I was the oldest by 10 years and far less idealistic.<p>No one listened to me when I kept asking “how will these conversations about best practices help us in the market? What does the customer want?”
I can appreciate the angle the author provides in this blog post, because I'm sure it will work for many startups.<p>However, there are many others where it simply won't work because a functional prototype is necessary to procure interest and funding. And the quality and depth of that prototype is key to achieving this as well.
There are things that need prototypes.<p>You can mock a bit, write about it, but if it works you can sometimes only find out in practice.<p>How would you build a minimal tic-tok competing with insta stories and snapchat? Surely not with youtube playlists or something.<p>Or dropbox: usb-drives in ubers?
Suppose you know everything, why would bother to help others? with altruism(a fool?), or for money(a poor?).
Suppose you know nothing. Could you sell what you don't know? And if it sells what would you deliver?
I believe if you are good enough you won't waste too much money selling.
This sounds like it only works for ideas that are easily codeable, otherwise you get stuff like theranos (and IMO hyperloop and wework) where the marketing, hype and customers are there before you even know if it's possible to build sustainably.