Eventually, I’ll need to build a product, not a feature. So, something that has multiple layers/features and will eventually be complex.
Sales is everything. It’ll be hard, the process will feel foreign and time consuming, but there will be zero success without it.
So, the overall process will be something like this: idea validation (probably lightweight, because how much will I even be able to validate in isolation) -> proof of concept (which, by design, needs to be shitty, because, if it isn’t, that means I spent more time than I should’ve to build it) -> build a feedback loop for sales and improving the product. The final loop, when done enough (maybe for 6-24 months), should eventually lead me to product market fit.
No one wakes up in the morning and thinks to themselves, “I want to buy a software product today”. Meaning, the product needs to solve a real business problem. Now, there could be existing products in the market - maybe it’s even a good thing if there are because that’s validation of the business domain - but, since my aim would be to build a feedback loop quickly, I’d probably need to pick a small scope, quickly build a shitty proof of concept and start sales.
That guy suggests, don’t invent a category. If that’s the case and the first product, by design, has to be shitty and scoped small, what does that mean? Pick any random existing category/domain, pick a niche and get started?
The first proof of concept, by design, needs to be shitty - it should work though and show customers how it solves a given problem. It’ll never be the case that I don’t get traction because the first product was shitty. Instead, if customers like the problem it solves, they should be willing to adopt it (at least for non-production environments) despite the fact that it is shitty. So, a shitty proof of concept is actually a smoke test for whether I’ve built something useful. (Kind of similar happened with Omni.)
This implies that the cost to build the first thing is actually pretty low, or rather it has to be low, by design. That’s quite liberating.
One YC video also mentioned that literally every company that’s big today - DoorDash, Dropbox, Airbnb etc. - started scrappy this way. Again, liberating.
This probably also means that, to get started, I need to solve one pressing problem for some customers. No need to solve grand stuff, just something tangible that someone will want to pay for.