> generally people say one should market their product first then build it if there's enough demand
I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.
I don't agree this is the common wisdom, and it's kind of a surprising take to see on this website specifically.
The growth hacking stuff took that idea even further, and for quite a while was all over this website.
That said, I disagree with said "wisdom", I just find it interesting that we've got diametrically opposed views on how this website perceived it!
The advice to build first and market later is actually advice that is much maligned in my experience, as there are too many stories of engineers who build and then find out they can't actually sell their product because they focused too much on the building and not enough on getting people to know about it.
Or more likely, there was no demand for their product to begin with.
There's nothing wrong with building to learn but the problem arises when engineers think building automatically leads to business success; the two are often entirely disjointed. WordPress is maligned as well but it's wildly successful for Automattic.
But in this case you need to validate it by building it and proving it can be done. The market is already prepped.
In which case, Web3? If so, I don't think the market is prepped at all, I don't really see people using it for what proponents say it'll be used for. If some other case, please elucidate me, I'm not sure what you're referring to otherwise.
Literally making a sale before the product exists is the extreme end of that philosophy. Whether or not this is good advise, or even possible, probably depends a lot on the domain. For most domains though, there is some degree of market research that can and should be done before investing in product development.
Enough money to survive on ramen for a few months and build a demo. Get feedback from users and iterate over and over.
Not every company that goes through YC are at the same stage. I've heard of companies joining YC despite already having over a million in ARR because of how valuable the YC network is.
YC invests 125k in each team, which is certainly enough to last more than a few months eating ramen if you are building the product yourself.
Also, trying to sell a product using a demo is not exactly the same as selling a finished product. At 0-1 stage, you can bet the demo hides the rough edges to some degree.
I would say selling using a demo falls somewhere on the sell-before-build spectrum, but one point I was trying to make is that it is not necessarily black-and-white.
I can guarantee you won't find anything Paul Graham has written about doing a bunch of marketing analysis as a first step.
No YC company is literally in stage 1 of its existence. First you need to get into YC, and you probably won't if you don't know anything about the market you are trying to reach.
This is indeed the original idea behind YCombinator. That was a very long time ago. Things have changed, both with the YCombinator company and the ethos of this web community.